A practical, accessible introduction to the study of disability art and culture around the world. What does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? Disability Arts and Culture seeks the answer to this question and more in an exploration of disability studies within the arts and beyond. In this collection, international scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches alongside textual and discourse analysis to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world. Chapters explore deaf theater productions, representations of disability on screen, community engagement projects, disabled bodies in dance, and more, in a comprehensive overview of disability studies that will benefit both practitioner and scholar.

This book presents interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture that explores disability in terms of lived experience. It will expand critical disability studies scholarship on representation and embodiment, which is theoretically rich, but lacking in attention to art. It is organized in five thematic parts: methodologies of access, agency, and ethics in cultural institutions; the politics and ethics of collaboration; embodied representations of artists with disabilities in the visual and performing arts; negotiating the outsider art label; and first-person reflections on disability and artmaking. This volume will be of interest to scholars who study disability studies, art history, art education, gender studies, museum studies, and visual culture.

In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled. Divided into 5 sections: Disability, Identity, and Representation Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience Access, Artistry, and Audiences Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time. It provides scholars, graduate students, upper level undergraduate students, and others interested in the disability rights agenda with a broad-based, practical and accessible introduction to key debates in the field of disability art, culture, and media studies. An internationally recognised selection of authors from around the world come together to articulate the theories, issues, interests, and practices that have come to define the field. Most critically, this book includes commentaries that forecast the pressing present and future concerns for the field as scholars, advocates, activists, and artists work to make a more inclusive society a reality.

This is the first book of its kind to feature interdisciplinary art history and disability studies. Moving away from the medical model of disability that is often scrutinized in art history, the book considers the social model and representations of disabled figures. Topics addressed include visible versus invisible impairments; scientific, anthropological, and vernacular images of disability; and the implications of looking/staring versus gazing. Disability and Art History explores ways in which art responds to, envisions, and at times stereotypes and pathologizes disability, and aims to contextualize disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture.

A richly diverse collection of essays, memoir, poetry and photography on aspects of disability and its representation in art

In this accessible introduction to the study of Disability Arts and Culture, Petra Kuppers foregrounds themes, artists and theoretical concepts in this diverse field. Complete with case studies, exercises and questions for further study, the book introduces students to the work of disabled artists and their allies, and explores artful responses to living with physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory difference. Engaging readers as cultural producers, Kuppers provides useful frameworks for critical analysis and encourages students to explore their own positioning within the frames of gender, race, sexuality, class and disability. Comprehensive and accessible, this is an essential handbook for undergraduate students or anyone interested in disabled bodies and minds in theatre, performance, creative writing, art and dance.

Performances in hospices and on beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book, now in paperback, presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade - a subtle engagement with disability culture.