Critical Perspectives on Disability Representation and Inclusion in Media

Drawing on a wide variety of print and digital media sources, this book discusses the need for inclusion and authentic portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the media, as the primary way that most people learn about them.

Containing 15 newly written chapters drawing on representations of disability in popular culture from film, television, social media, and print media in both the Global North and the Global South, including the United States, Ukraine, Japan, India and Italy, this volume shows that although disability and neurodiversity have long been framed using a limited range of stereotypical tropes such as victims, supercrips, or suffering patients, and have functioned as what scholars refer to as narrative prosthesis, storylines and characters involving prominent disability themes and representations are making their way into an increasing number of mainstream media productions and publications. The question remains whether the increased quantity is correlated with increased quality of representation and inclusion for people with disabilities.

This insightful volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural studies, media and film studies, gender studies, and sociology more broadly.

Michael S. Jeffress is a full professor at Medical University of the Americas in Nevis, West Indies. He has been involved in disability advocacy work since the late- 1990s, after his son was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Critical Perspectives on Disability Representation and Inclusion in Media is his fourth edited volume in Routledge’s Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series, in addition to his monograph Communication, Sport and Disability: The Case of Power Soccer published in 2015.