The SAGE Reference Series on Disability is a cross-disciplinary and issues-based series incorporating links from varied fields that make up Disability Studies. This volume tackles issues relating to disability through the life course.

Disability and the Life Course, first published in 2001, explores the global experience of disability using a novel life course approach. The book explores how disabling societies impact on disabled people's life experiences, and highlights the ways in which disabled people have acted to take more control over their own lives. It provides a unique combination of analysis, policy issues and autobiography, offering the reader a rare opportunity to make links between the theoretical, the political and the personal in a single volume. The material is set in a truly international context, with contributions from thirteen different countries bringing together established and emerging writers, both disabled and non-disabled. The book bridges some important gaps in the existing disability literature by including issues relevant to disabled people of all ages and with different kinds of impairments and also by offering a unique analysis of the relationship between disability and generation in a changing world.

Disability: a Life Course Approach provides students and teachers with easy access to many of the most important current disability issues and debates. It provides a clearly focused account, and bridges some important gaps in the existing disability literature by including issues relevant to disabled people of all ages. If offers a unique approach to understanding disabling societies in a systematic way, using a novel life course approach. This book examines how contemporary societies organise and control generational boundaries and progression through the life course for disabled people. There are specific chapters on birthrights and eugenics, childhood, youth transitions, interdependence and adulthood, old age and death and dying. The emphasis is on contemporary policy and politics (located within a broader sociological and cultural context) including the claims and struggles of the disabled people's movement. The discussion is framed within a social model approach and draws extensively on contemporary international debates about the citizenship and human rights of disabled people. The book functions both as a resource guide and as a tool for learning. The various chapters include reviews of existing literature and theoretical debates, alongside specific examples of disabling policies and practices in different countries. There are also case studies illustrating key issues, together with relevant discussion and teaching points, and suggestions for further research and reading. The book addresses an international readership and will be of particular interest to students and teachers of disability studies, sociology, human development, social policy; to professionals and students within rehabilitation and social work; and to disabled people and lay readers with an interest in contemporary disability issues and debates.

This is the first book to address the issue of ageing after a long life with disability. It breaks new ground through its particular life course perspective, examining what it means to age with a physical or mental disability and what the implications are of 'becoming old' for people who have had extensive disabilities for many years. These people may have had to leave the labour market early, and the book looks at available care resources, both formal and informal. Ageing with disability challenges set ideas about successful ageing, as well as some of those about disabilities. The life course approach that is used unfolds important insights about the impact of multiple disabilities over time and on the phases of life. The book highlights the meaning of care in unexplored contexts, such as where ageing parents are caregivers or regarding mutual care in disabled couples. These are areas of knowledge which have, to date, been totally neglected.

Over the last three decades, a number of reforms have taken place in European social policy with an impact on the opportunities for persons with disabilities to be full and active members of society. The policy reforms have aimed to change the balance between citizens’ rights and duties and the opportunities to enjoy choice and autonomy, live in the community and participate in political decision-making processes of importance for one’s life. How do the reforms influence the opportunities to exercise Active Citizenship? This volume presents the findings from the first cross-national comparison of how persons with disabilities reflexively make their way through the world, pursuing their own interests and values. The volume considers how their experiences, views and aspirations regarding participation vary across Europe. Based on retrospective life-course interviews, the volume examines the scope for agency on the part of persons with disabilities, i.e. the extent to which men and women with disabilities are able to make choices and pursue lives they have reasons to value. Drawing on structuration theory and the capability approach, the volume investigates the opportunities for exercising Active Citizenship among men and women in nine European countries. The volume identifies the policy implications of a process-oriented and multi-dimensional approach to Active Citizenship in European disability policy. It will appeal to policymakers and policy officials, as well as to researchers and students of disability studies, comparative social policy, international disability law and qualitative research methods.

This volume examines the developmental aspects of the general psychological construct of self-determination. The term refers to self- (vs. other-) caused action—to people acting volitionally—as based on their own will. Research conducted in the fields of psychology and education shows the importance of self-determination to adolescent development and positive adult outcomes. The first part of this volume presents an overview of theories and historical antecedents of the construct. It looks at the role of self-determination in major theories of human agentic behavior and of adolescent development and individuation. The second part of the volume examines the developmental origins and the trajectory of self-determination in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and looks as aging aspects. The next part presents studies on the evolutionary aspects, individual differences and healthy psychological development. The last part of the book covers the development of causal and agentic capability.

Rosalyn Darling offers a sweeping examination of disability identity, tracing its history and parsing the shifting forces that have shaped individual and societal understandings of ability and impairment across time.Darling focuses on the relationship between societal views and the self-conceptions of people with mental and physical impairments. She also illuminates the impact of the disability rights movement, life-course dynamics, and race and gender in creating a diversity of disability identities. Her seminal work reveals the remarkable resilience of individuals in the face of profound social and material barriers, at the same time that it enhances our understanding of the construction and experience of ¿difference¿ in our changing society.