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Ancient Greek images of disability permeate the Western consciousness: Homer, Teiresias, and Oedipus immediately come to mind. But The Staff of Oedipus looks at disability in the ancient world through the lens of disability studies, and reveals that our interpretations of disability in the ancient world are often skewed. These false assumptions in turn lend weight to modern-day discriminatory attitudes toward disability.

Martha L. Rose considers a range of disabilities and the narratives surrounding them. She examines not only ancient literature, but also papyrus, skeletal material, inscriptions, sculpture, and painting, and draws upon modern work, including autobiographies of people with disabilities, medical research, and theoretical work in disability studies. Her study uncovers the realities of daily life for people with disabilities in ancient Greece and challenges the translation of the term adunatos (unable) as "disabled," with all its modern associations.

Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics

Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.

Revealing how people in need advocated for and negotiated their own care until the development of standardized medicine

The Voices of Need uncovers how men and women in Charlestown, Massachusetts, who turned to municipal authorities for aid, actively shaped how their need was understood and addressed. Through a close examination of Charlestown’s care networks, Angela Keysor shows how town selectmen relied on sufferers themselves to articulate what would relieve their distress, while local women—paid by town authorities—provided hands-on care in homes and neighborhoods. These networks flourished in the early and mid-eighteenth century, but their flexibility and responsiveness were increasingly strained by crisis and change. A devastating smallpox epidemic in 1763, followed by racialized debates over belonging after the legal end of enslavement in Massachusetts in 1783, exposed the limits of community-based care.

After the American Revolution, rising numbers of aid requests prompted town officials to reorganize care through a contract system in which paid caregivers attended to multiple dependents at once. As care became centralized and standardized, the space for individuals to define their own needs—and to influence how those needs were met—steadily narrowed. By 1819, with the founding of Massachusetts General Hospital, sufferers were fully redefined as patients, expected to submit to professional authority rather than participate in decisions about their own care.

Tracing this transition from negotiated assistance to institutional medicine, The Voices of Need illuminates a largely forgotten history of agency among the poor and infirm. In doing so, Keysor challenges conventional narratives of early American health care and shows how the rise of standardized medicine fundamentally reshaped the meaning of need, care, and authority. 

The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.

“A harrowing memoir. . . . Readers may not want to follow in [Shinn’s] footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion.” ​—Kirkus Reviews

The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.

Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention’s Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide.

Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.

The remarkable memoir of a Touretter’s journey of self-discovery—now back in print!