Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability ― Looking Towards the Future

How can a deep engagement with disability studies change our understanding of sociology, literary studies, gender studies, aesthetics, bioethics, social work, law, education, or history?

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability (the companion volume to Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies) identifies both the practical and theoretical implications of such an interdisciplinary dialogue and challenges people in disability studies as well as other disciplinary fields to critically reflect on their professional praxis in terms of theory, practice, and methods.

Topics covered include interdisciplinary outlooks ranging from media studies, games studies, education, performance, history and curation through to theology and immunology. Perspectives are drawn from different regions from the European Union to the Global South with chapters that draw on a range of different national backgrounds. Our contributors who write as either disabled people or allies do not proceed from a singular approach to disability, often reflecting different or even opposing positions. The collection features contributions from both established and new voices in international disability studies outlining their own visions for the future of the field.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability will be of interest to all scholars and students working within the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, sociology, law history and education. The concerns raised here are further in Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies.

Katie Ellis is associate professor and senior research fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University. She holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research award for a project on disability and digital televisions and is series editor of Routledge Research in Disability and Media Studies.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, where her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, inclusion and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy.

Mike Kent is an associate professor and head of the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, Western Australia. Mike’s research focus is on people with disabilities and their use of, and access to, information technology and the Internet.

Rachel Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at Curtin University with research interests in critical disability studies, literary and cultural studies, feminist maternal studies and life writing. She is the author of Reaching one thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism. Her articles on disability and motherhood have been published in journals such as Hecate, Studies in the Maternal and the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture.