Claiming Disability : Knowledge and Identity
New York University Press, 1998
In series: Cultural Front Michael Berube, General Editor
ISBN: 0-8147-5134-2
About the book
Reviews
Simi Linton has been at the forefront of disability
studies since its early days. While on the faculty at Hunter
College she wrote the groundbreaking study of this field, Claiming
Disability: Knowledge and Identity. She was awarded a Mary
E. Switzer Distinguished Fellowship by the US Department of
Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation
Research, 1995-1996, which allowed her to complete this work.
She has been the Co-Director of the University
Seminar in Disability Studies at Columbia University
since 2003.
About the book
As disabled people
have emerged from the shadows of institutions and back rooms,
upping the ante on the demands for an inclusive society,
a remarkable groundswell of activism and critical literature
has followed. Claiming
Disability charts
these social changes and intellectual shifts in the first
comprehensive examination of disability studies as a field
of inquiry.
Disability studies provides a location to think
critically about disability, a juncture that can serve both
academic discourse and social change. The field takes for its
subject matter not simply the variations that exist in human
behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive
processing, but the meaning we make of those variations. It
can serve to hold academics accountable for the veracity and
the social consequences of their work, as activism has served
to hold the community, the education system and the legislature
accountable for disabled people's compromised social position.
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