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Frequently Used Resources
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Disability in the Modern WorldPrimary sources, supporting materials, archives, and video content designed to enrich study in a wide range of disciplines from media studies to philosophy.
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Academic Search CompleteMultidisciplinary index and full text source for scholarly journals and magazines.
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America: History & LifeIndex with abstracts to history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
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Communication & Mass Media CompleteArticle index with some full text in the fields of communication and mass media studies.
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Criminal Justice AbstractsIndex with abstracts of international journal articles, books, reports, dissertations.
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Education Research CompleteFull text journals on educational research in early childhood to higher education, educational specialties, multilingual education, health education and testing.
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SocINDEX with Full TextFull text coverage of scholarly publications in sociology, including journals, magazines, books, working papers, dissertations, conference proceedings, and an extensive thesaurus
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JMU Library CatalogFind journals, books, ebooks, films, sound recordings, and government documents available to JMU users.
Selected Resources
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Disability Language Style GuideBy the National Center on Disability and Journalism
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Disability Resource GuideA list of resource guides on various disabilities, disability theory, and assistive technologies.
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Evaluating Articles in Disability StudiesArticles about disability may not be from a Disability Studies perspective. This guide provides some questions to ask that can help you evaluate sources.
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Society for Disability Studies (SDS)"An international non-profit organization that promotes the study of disability in social, cultural, and political contexts."
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Texas Disability History CollectionArchival collections curated by the University of Texas Arlington.
Selected Books on Disability Studies
Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center.
Disability: A Reference Handbook
This volume offers a rare mix of interpretive chapters and primary sources that will be of value to anyone interested in learning about important disability-related issues from the perspective of disabled people themselves.
Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education
Disability is not always central to claims about diversity and inclusion in higher education, but should be. This collection reveals the pervasiveness of disability issues and considerations within many higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators, and staff.
The Disability Studies Reader
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. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well.
Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies
This fully revised and expanded second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies takes a multidisciplinary approach to disability and provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of the main issues in the field around the world today. Adopting an international perspective and arranged thematically, it surveys the state of the discipline, examining emerging and cutting-edge areas as well as core areas of contention.
Keywords for Disability Studies
Keywords for Disability Studies aims to broaden and define the conceptual framework of disability studies for readers and practitioners in the field and beyond. The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and end of life.
Disability Rhetoric
Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical.
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.
Feminist Disability Studies
Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today. This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability.
Selected Journals on Disability Studies
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Canadian Journal of Disability Studies"The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies publishes peer-reviewed original articles that advance research in the multidisciplinary, international field of disability studies. All content is totally open access."
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Disability & Society"Disability & Society is an international journal providing a focus for debate about such issues as human rights, discrimination, definitions, policy and practices. It appears against a background of change in the ways in which disability is viewed and responded to."
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Disability Studies Quarterly"Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) is the journal of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). It is a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities, disability rights advocates, creative writers, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities."
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Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability StudiesFocusing on cultural and especially literary representations of disability, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) publishes a wide variety of textual analyses that are informed by disability theory and, by extension, experiences of disability.
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Mental Health and Social Inclusion"Mental Health and Social Inclusion is primarily written by practitioners for practitioners working to promote social inclusion of people with mental health conditions."
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Review of Disability StudiesThe Review of Disability Studies (RDS) is a peer-reviewed academic journal that is targeted towards any person interested in disability studies.