ABSTRACT

Many critical analyses of disability address important ‘macro’ concerns, but are often far removed from an interactional and micro-level focus. Written by leading scholars in the field, and containing a range of theoretical and empirical contributions from around the world, this book focuses on the taken-for-granted, mundane human activities at the heart of how social life is reproduced, and how this impacts on the lives of those with a disability, family members, and other allies.

It departs from earlier accounts by making sense of how disability is lived, mobilised, and enacted in everyday lives. Although broad in focus and navigating diverse social contexts, chapters are united by a concern with foregrounding micro, mundane moments for making sense of powerful discourses, practices, affects, relations, and world-making for disabled people and their allies. Using different examples – including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, dementia, polio, and Parkinson’s disease – contributions move beyond a simplified narrow classification of disability which creates rigid categories of existence and denies bodily variation.

Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday should be considered essential reading for disability studies students and academics, as well as professionals involved in health and social care. With contributions located within new and familiar debates around embodiment, stigma, gender, identity, inequality, care, ethics, choice, materiality, youth, and representation, this book will be of interest to academics from different disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, humanities, public health, allied health professions, science and technology studies, social work, and social policy.

part I|37 pages

Disability, normalcy, and the everyday

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

Disability, normalcy, and the everyday

chapter 2|21 pages

Keeping up appearances

Family carers and people with dementia negotiating normalcy through dress practice

part II|63 pages

Youth, normalcy, and disability futures

chapter 4|21 pages

Pursuit of ordinariness

Dynamics of conforming and resisting in disabled young people’s embodied practices

part III|55 pages

Doing care, creating living

chapter 6|18 pages

Who’s disabled, Babe?

Carving out a good life among the normal and everyday

chapter 7|19 pages

‘I employ a crew that can do life with me’

A young woman’s creative self-management of support workers

chapter 8|16 pages

(Re)negotiating normal every day

Phenomenological uncertainty in Parkinson’s disease

part IV|43 pages

Global disability politics