Oxford LibGuides: Changing the narrative: championing inclusive collection development: Disability Studies

Introduction

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field concerned with the study of disabled people globally. Disability Studies also considers the social constructions of 'ability' and 'disability' and how this related to people society labels 'disabled'. For more information on how disability can be defined see the WHO's page here.

The Equality and Diversity Unit co-ordinates the Disabled Staff Network and the Disability Advisory Group meets regularly to advise the University on issues relating to staff disability.

Getting started - introductory online resources

The following resources offer overviews of the field of Disability Studies:

Oxford Bibliographies provide an up-to-date overview of the most recent and authoritative scholarship in a given field. Although the following bibliographies are part of the Education and Childhood collections they have good overviews of Disability Studies as a discipline:

Disability (Childhood Studies)

Disability (Education)

The Institute of Historical Research has an in-depth guide to History of Disability collections here.

Disability also intersects with other protected characteristics, cultures and communities. Oxford Bibliographies provide a guide to scholarship on Race and Disability here.

Overviews

Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited by Tom Shakespeare
ISBN: 9780415527606
Publication Date: 2013
Over the last forty years, the field of disability studies has emerged from the political activism of disabled people. In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that disability research needs a firmer conceptual and empirical footing.
The Biopolitics of Disability by David T. Mitchell
ISBN: 9780472121182
Publication Date: 2015
In the neoliberal era, when human worth is measured by its relative utility within global consumer culture, selected disabled people have been able to gain entrance into late capitalist culture. The Biopolitics of Disability terms this phenomenon "ablenationalism" and asserts that "inclusion" becomes meaningful only if disability is recognized as providing modes of living that are alternatives to governing norms of productivity and independence. Thus, the book pushes beyond questions of impairment to explore how disability subjectivities create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective consciousness.
The Disability Studies Reader by Lennard J. Davis (Editor)
ISBN: 9781317397861
Publication Date: 2017
The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind.