How can health and social care services better serve people with disabilities? How can we meaningfully challenge ableist practice? What would a truly inclusive system look like? Georgia Vine answers these questions and more as she charts her journey from her experience of children's services to occupational therapist and disability activist. Discussing stigma, independence, and the transition to adulthood, Georgia provides vital insight into the challenges she has faced and the communities she has built along the way. Each chapter includes a reflection log enabling health and social care workers to think critically and practically about what they've learnt and how best to apply it to their role.

The onslaught of neoliberalism, austerity measures and cuts, impact of climate change, protracted conflicts and ongoing refugee crisis, rise of far right and populist movements have all negatively impacted on disability. Yet, disabled people and their allies are fighting back and we urgently need to understand how, where and what they are doing, what they feel their challenges are and what their future needs will be. This comprehensive handbook emphasizes the importance of everyday disability activism and how activists across the world bring together a wide range of activism tactics and strategies. It also challenges the activist movements, transnational and emancipatory politics, as well as providing future directions for disability activism. With contributions from senior and emerging disability activists, academics, students and practitioners from around the globe, this handbook covers the following broad themes: • Contextualising disability activism in global activism • Neoliberalism and austerity in the global North • Rights, embodied resistance and disability activism • Belonging, identity and values: how to create diverse coalitions for rights • Reclaiming social positions, places and spaces • Social media, support and activism • Campus activism in higher education • Inclusive pedagogies, evidence and activist practices • Enabling human rights and policy • Challenges facing disability activism The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism provides disability activists, students, academics, practitioners, development partners and policy makers with an authoritative framework for disability activism.

Delving into the diverse experiences of minoritised occupational therapists, this book contributes to the increasingly critical need for cultural humility in healthcare and discusses difficult topics surrounding culture, race, and religion with clarity and humanity. Using a wealth of research and knowledge on different cultures and communities this illuminating book focusses on a person-centred approach and encourages meaningful dialogue and self-reflection. Co-authored by the Coalition of Occupational Therapy Advocates for Diversity, this invaluable resource will allow you to journey through real-world experiences and cultural contexts through in-depth case studies and interviews from OTs at varying stages of their career. Occupational Identity will equip you with rich insights and actionable guidance in order to promote a better understanding of race, religion, and culture. Whether you're a seasoned OT, student, educator, or healthcare worker, this book will help you embrace diversity, establish better trust and communication, and deliver compassionate and culturally nuanced care that promotes better health outcomes for all.

A foundational book for use from the classroom to fieldwork and throughout practice, Willard & Spackman’s Occupational Therapy, 14th Edition, remains the must-have resource for the Occupational Therapy profession. This cornerstone of OT and OTA education offers students a practical, comprehensive overview of the many theories and facets of OT care, while its status as one of the top texts informing the NBCOT certification exam makes it an essential volume for new practitioners. The updated 14th edition presents a more realistic and inclusive focus of occupational therapy as a world-wide approach to enhancing occupational performance, participation, and quality of life. It aims to help today’s students and clinicians around the world focus on the pursuit of fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all while striving to identify and eliminate barriers that prevent full participation.

Key Skills for Housing Adaptations delves into the crucial role occupational therapists play in helping people with additional needs adapt their homes in order to give them a better quality of life. Highlighting the long-term benefits environmental adjustments can afford, this accessible and practical book combines key skills needed to carry out home adaptations, from professional reasoning skills and cultural considerations to relevant legislation and the roles and remits of people working in the field. Supplemented with knowledge checks preceding every chapter, practical exercises, and case studies as well as digital resources including examples of architectural plans and videos that bring the theory to life, this is a comprehensive and essential tool for both new and seasoned occupational therapists looking to make a positive impact on clients' home lives.

This book explores the concept of "occupation" in disability well beyond traditional clinical formulations of disability: it considers disability not in terms of pathology or impairment, but as a range of unique social identities and experiences that are shaped by visible or invisible diagnoses/impairments, socio-cultural perceptions and environmental barriers and offers innovative ideas on how to apply theoretical training to real world contexts. Inspired by disability justice and “Disability Occupy Wall Street / Decolonize Disability” movements in the US and related movements abroad, this book builds on politically engaged critical approaches to disability that intersect occupational therapy, disability studies and anthropology. "Occupying Disability" will provide a discursive space where the concepts of disability, culture and occupation meet critical theory, activism and the creative arts. The concept of “occupation” is intentionally a moving target in this book. Some chapters discuss occupying spaces as a form of protest or alternatively, protesting against territorial occupations. Others present occupations as framed or problematized within the fields of occupational therapy and occupational science and anthropology as engagement in meaningful activities. The contributing authors come from a variety of professional, academic and activist backgrounds to include perspectives from theory, practice and experiences of disability. Emergent themes include: all the permutations of the concept of "occupy," disability justice/decolonization, marginalization and minoritization, technology, struggle, creativity and change. This book will engage clinicians, social scientists, activists and artists in dialogues about disability as a theoretical construct and lived experience.

Disability is defined by hierarchy. Regardless of culture or context, persons with disabilities are almost always pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy. With the advent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), disability human rights seemingly provided a path forward for tearing down ableist social hierarchies and ensuring that all persons with disabilities everywhere were treated equally. Despite important progress, the disability human rights project not only remains incomplete, but has often created new hierarchies among persons with disabilities themselves or across the human rights it promotes. Certain groups of persons with disabilities have gained new voices while others remain silenced and certain rights are prioritized over others depending on what states, international organizations, or advocates want rather than what those on the ground need most. This volume was inspired both by the continued need to expose human rights violations against persons with disabilities, but to also explore the nuanced role that hierarchies play in the spread, implementation, and protection of disability human rights. The enjoyment of human rights is not equal nor is the recognition of specific individuals and groups’ rights. In order to change this situation, inequalities across the disability human rights movement must be explored. Divided into five parts: Who counts as disabled? Political, social, and cultural context Which rights on top, whose rights on bottom? Pushed to the periphery in the disability rights movement Representations of disability and comprised of 34 newly-written chapters including case-studies from the Anglophone Caribbean, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Serbia and South Africa, and other countries, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, human rights law and social policy.