Disability Research Today ─ International Perspectives

Grouped around four central themes - illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations – this exciting collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways.

New Directions in Disability Research opens by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multi-disciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and Deafness.

Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. New Directions in Disability Research is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.

Tom Shakespeare is Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at the Medical School of the University of East Anglia, UK. Previously he worked for the World Health Organization, where he was an author and editor of the World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011), and International Perspectives on Spinal Cord Injury (WHO, 2013). His books include The Sexual Politics of Disability (Cassell, 1996) and Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge 2006, 2013). He has been involved in the disability movement since 1986.