This book is a critical disability studies examination of the lived experience of chronic pain, engaging with and making a significant contribution to crip theory and the concept of ‘crip time’. Exploring experiences of pain and fatigue for people who live with chronic pain and based on narratives told through in-depth detailed interviews interwoven with theory at the cutting edge of critical disability studies, it demonstrates that our knowledge and understanding of chronic pain is incomplete without a critical disability studies approach. Through conceptualizing the concept of ‘crip time’ via participants’ narratives of living with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and variable disabilities, this book demonstrates how thinking about chronic pain and fatigue with ‘crip time’ exposes normative, ableist, assumptions underlying both how pain and the ideas of cure and recovery are understood. It will be of interest to all academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, critical disability studies, crip theory, medical sociology, sexuality, and studies of embodiment, corporeality, and temporality more generally.

This book focuses on injustices that have taken place to deaf people and the sign language community in Finland from 1900. For decades, memories and stories about past injustices have been passed down from one generation to another among deaf people and the sign language community. This research explains this history from the perspective of deaf people and their community and contributes to the truth and reconciliation process of the Finnish Government with the community, which is globally the first of its kind. Using participatory research methods, it is relevant for Disability Studies, Social Work, and Human Rights Studies, Political Science and History.

This book looks at disability as an evolving social phenomenon. Disability is created through the interaction between persons with impairments and their environment. Exploring these experiences of persons with disabilities and discussing universality and particularity in our understanding of assumed development and normalcy, it takes Finland, which has been chosen repeatedly as the happiest country in the world as its case- study. Using disability as a critical lens helps to demystify Finland that has the positive reputation of a Welfare State. By identifying different kinds of discrimination against persons with disabilities as well as successful examples of disability inclusion, it shows that when looking Finland from the perspective of persons with disabilities, inequality and poverty have been collective experiences of too many of them. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, political science, health and well-being studies and Nordic studies more broadly.

This book uses Ubuntu philosophy to illuminate the voices of people with disabilities from Sub-Saharan Africa. Disability literature is largely dominated by scholars and studies from the Global North, and these studies are largely informed by Global North theories and concepts. Although disability literature in the Global South is now fast growing, most studies continue to utilise conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical frameworks that are framed within Global North contexts. This presents two major challenges: Firstly, the voices of people with disabilities in the Global South remain on the fringes of disability discourses. Secondly, when their voices are heard, their realities are distorted. This edited book, consisting of 11 chapters, provides case studies from Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Uganda, and South Africa, explores disability in various fields: Inclusive education, higher education, environment, Open Distance Learning, and Technical and Vocational Education and Technical Colleges. The book contributes to the ways in which disability is understood and experienced in the Global South thereby challenging the Western hegemonic discourses on disability. This collection of contributions will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, development studies, medical sociology, and African studies.

This book examines the role of disability in the right to political and social participation, an act of citizenship that many disabled people do not enjoy. The disability rights movement does not accept the use of disability to create limits on citizenship, which poses challenges for contemporary societies that will become ever greater as the science and technology of enhancing human abilities evolves. Comprised of eight chapters, three interludes, and a postscript written by leading scholars and disability rights activists, the book explores citizenship for people with disabilities from an interdisciplinary perspective using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a point of departure and the concept of universal design as a strategy for actualizing full citizenship for all. Situating disability in its historical and cultural contexts, the authors offer directions for rethinking citizenship, including implications for access to the built environment, information and communication systems, education, work, community life and politics. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, planning, architecture, public health, rehabilitation, social work, and education.

A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Although pain is widely recognized by clinicians and researchers as an experience, pain is always felt in a patient-specific way rather than experienced for what it objectively is, making perceived meaning important in the study of pain. The book contributors explain why meaning is important in the way that pain is felt and promote the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods to study meanings of pain. For the first time in a book, the study of the meanings of pain is given the attention it deserves. All pain research and medicine inevitably have to negotiate how pain is perceived, how meanings of pain can be described within the fabric of a person’s life and neurophysiology, what factors mediate them, how they interact and change over time, and how the relationship between patient, researcher, and clinician might be understood in terms of meaning. Though meanings of pain are not intensively studied in contemporary pain research or thoroughly described as part of clinical assessment, no pain researcher or clinician can avoid asking questions about how pain is perceived or the types of data and scientific methods relevant in discovering the answers.