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In Racial Care, James McMaster studies the forms of care that Asian Americans have taken up to survive the suffering they experience under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy in the United States. He shows that racialized labors of care can cut multiple ways: sustaining life for its recipients, draining life from its performers. Uplifting examples of this dynamic from Asian American theater, performance art, visual culture, film, poetry, protest, and everyday life, McMaster advances a racialized ethics and politics of care forged from the insights of feminist, queer, and disability theory. He argues that racial care in the Asian American case must respond both to the specific sort of neglect Asian Americans face as a consequence of model minority racialization and to the urgent needs for care that exist among other racialized and colonized peoples. Following the lead of artists and writers like Kristina Wong, Mark Aguhar, Kimberly Alidio, Julia Cho, kt shorb, and Jess X. Snow, Racial Care provides a path forward for all seeking to sustain multiply marginalized Asian American life in times of overlapping crisis.

The candid, inspiring story of a woman’s experience with a chronic, unpredictable neurological condition

When twenty-nine-year-old reporter Stacia Kalinoski regained consciousness on a couch at the  TV station where she worked, she assumed that she’d had another seizure. But the electrical storm that had just torn through her brain was more destructive than she could have imagined, and the broadcast journalism career she loved swiftly came to an end. Forced to confront the reality of her medical condition, Kalinoski made the risky decision to undergo brain surgery, targeting the epilepsy that was ravaging her life.

In Racing Uphill, Kalinoski describes the seizures that occurred while she was running, which led to her pursuit of an uncertain cure. Rallying the grit she developed as an athlete and engaging the research and reporting skills she acquired as a journalist, she gives us a rare inside look at the ways epilepsy can change a life. Moving beyond her own personal experience, Kalinoski interviews prominent epileptologists to understand how seizures can spread, steal memories, and create strange behaviors and mood disorders. She seamlessly joins what she learned from her research with her own story, offering valuable insight into the experience of grappling with a relentless neurological disease.

The vivid auras that preceded seizures and the damage that followed; the toll of her epilepsy on her family and loved ones; the extraordinary determination her reckoning required—these are all part of Kalinoski’s story of adversity, denial, acceptance, and resilience. In sharing the remarkable opportunity that epilepsy presented for her courage and growth, Stacia Kalinoski speaks to anyone facing an uphill battle and offers inspiration for taking control of one’s own health.

In Radical Health Julie Avril Minich examines the potential of Latinx expressive culture to intervene in contemporary health politics, elaborating how Latinx artists have critiqued ideologies of health that frame wellbeing in terms of personal behavior. Within this framework, poor health—obesity, asthma, diabetes, STIs, addiction, and high-risk pregnancies—is attributed to irresponsible lifestyle choices among the racialized poor. Countering this, Latinx writers and visual artists envision health not as individual duty but as communal responsibility. Bringing a disability justice approach to questions of health access and equity, Minich locates a concept of radical health within the work of Latinx artists, including the poetry of Rafael Campo, the music of Hurray for the Riff Raff, the fiction of Angie Cruz, and the performance art of Virginia Grise. Radical health operates as a modality that both challenges the stigma of unhealth and protests the social conditions that give rise to racial health disparities. Elaborating on this modality, Minich claims a critical role for Latinx artists in addressing the structural racism in public health. 

A tender, wrenching, and comic novel that follows two twin boys from infancy to the cusp of adulthood.

Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.

Told through multiple perspectives—Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael—this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling. The twins’ upbringing in suburban Ohio is familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, as this middle-class family navigates the challenges and rewards of nurturing a special-needs human with a killer dimple who is utterly and winningly himself: sweet, stubborn, mischievous, impenetrable, and above all, very funny.

Michael feels that he alone understands Sal and devotes himself to giving his brother a voice in the “normal” world until he grows up and can’t “hear” his twin anymore—his worst fear. Their mother, a teacher who has given up her career for caregiving, and their father, who is determined to succeed in his research, also struggle with the balance of sacrifice and duty and love, especially as Sal’s health deteriorates. Before Michael leaves for college, the twins spend a final week together at a summer camp for people with disabilities, and Sal does something that changes their lives forever.

Transforming perceptions of disability and interdependence through tender attention to detail, Range of Motion is wrenching, beautiful, and sharply comic.

“The thing that people don’t understand is that Bob was my invention,” says Sheree Rose, the oft-overlooked partner of the late “supermasochist” performance artist Bob Flanagan. Unpacking this statement is at the heart of this important collection, which seeks to recuperate and showcase Rose’s contributions as performer, photographer, writer, and cultural innovator. While Rose is mostly known for blurring the boundaries between art and lived experience in the context of her full-time, mistress-slave relationship with Flanagan, Rated RX shifts focus from Flanagan to Rose, presenting a feminist project that critically reassesses the artistic legacies of Sheree Rose.
 
Curated with attention to queer-crip subjectivities and transgressive feminisms, Rated RX includes essays by and interviews with scholars, artists, and Rose’s collaborators that address gender politics, archival practices, minority embodiment, and disability in Rose’s work as well as more than eighty photographs and rare archival materials reflecting Rose’s recent and past performances. Offering a necessary corrective, Rated RX is the first collection to underscore Sheree Rose as a legendary figure in performance art and BDSM subcultural history, reflecting her lifetime of involvement in documenting the underground and the transformative role her work plays in sexual, subcultural, and art exhibitionism.
 

An interdisciplinary survey of disability in socialist states throughout global history.

In Re/imaginations of Disability in State Socialism, an interdisciplinary group of scholars examines how disability has been conceptualized and treated in socialist states throughout global history. Drawing on intersectional theories that set disability in conversation with other identity categories such as race, age, gender, and sexuality, this book offers a unique approach to this crucial issue.

    This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing  memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse.
    Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States—such works as Juliet Wittman’s Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family—Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser’s discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people.
    With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.

Winner of the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day. 

Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.

"A radical methodological approach to psychology that is open to social change - in an anti-capitalist, anti-racist and feminist politics." Antonio Negri

Psychology is meant to help people cope with the afflictions of modern society. But how useful is it? Ian Parker argues that current psychological practice has become part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Ideal for undergraduates, this book deconstructs the discipline to reveal the neoliberal sensitivities that underlie its theory and practice. Psychology focuses on the happiness of 'the individual'. Yet it neglects the fact that the happiness of the individual depends on their social and political surroundings.

Ian Parker argues that a new approach to psychology is needed. He offers an alternative vision, outlining how the discipline can be linked to political practice and how it can help people as part of a wider progressive agenda. This groundbreaking book is at the cutting edge of current thinking on the discipline and should be required reading on all psychology courses.

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.

A thoughtful exploration of autism, offering a new understanding of social relations through a sensory-perceptual approach

Sensitive and flighty, horses require carefully designed environments to help them feel calm and soothed—precisely the sort of places that are understood to help some autistic youth to flourish. In Rhythms of Care, Roslyn Malcolm changes the conversation around autism, detailing shifting understandings of the condition from neurological misfiring to a whole-body condition of sensory-perceptual difference.

Malcolm chronicles the experiences of several autistic youth and their families at two UK equestrian riding centers, developing new language to elaborate on an advancing sense of autistic embodiment and sociality emerging through equine-assisted therapy. Her inquiry turns away from a focus on autistic brains and toward cultivating ecologies where autistic people's ways of being and embodiments can be accepted and supported.

Tracing the role of sensory and endocrinological knowledge in our formulations of bodies, empathy, and personhood, Rhythms of Care explores more-than-human sociality, multispecies distributions of care, and the anthropology of the body. In our chronically stressful and overstimulating era of late capitalism and inequality, Malcolm envisions a sensory environment for all beings.

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Richard III will always be central to English disability history as both man and myth—a disabled medieval king made into a monster by his nation’s most important artist.

In Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richard’s own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeare’s soliloquies, into Samuel Johnson’s editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater. For Wilson, the changing meanings of disability created through shifting perspectives in Shakespeare’s plays prefigure a series of modern attempts to understand Richard’s body in different disciplinary contexts—from history and philosophy to sociology and medicine.

While theorizing a role for Shakespeare in the field of disability history, Wilson reveals how Richard III has become an index for some of modernity’s central concerns—the tension between appearance and reality, the conflict between individual will and external forces of nature and culture, the possibility of upward social mobility, and social interaction between self and other, including questions of discrimination, prejudice, hatred, oppression, power, and justice.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a variety of original sources, Katharina Heyer examines three case studies—Germany, Japan, and the United Nations—to trace the evolution of a disability rights model from its origins in the U.S. through its adaptations in other democracies to its current formulation in international law. She demonstrates that, although notions of disability, equality, and rights are reinterpreted and contested within various political contexts, ultimately the result may be a more robust and substantive understanding of equality.