Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies)

Using sources from a wide variety of print and digital media, this book discusses the need for ample and healthy portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the media, as the primary way that most people learn about conditions.

It contains 13 newly written chapters drawing on representations of disability in popular culture from film, television, and print media in both the Global North and the Global South, including the United States, Canada, India, and Kenya. Although disability is often framed using a limited range of stereotypical tropes such as victims, supercrips, or suffering patients, this book shows how disability and neurodiversity are making their way into more mainstream media productions and publications with movies, television shows, and books featuring prominent and even lead characters with disabilities or neurodiversity.

Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, and sociology more broadly.

Michael S. Jeffress (PhD, Regent University) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has been involved in disability advocacy work since the late-1990s, after his son was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He is a past recipient of the Top Paper Award from the Disability Issues Caucus of the National Communication Association. He is the author of Communication, Sport and Disability: The Case of Power Soccer (2015) and editor of Pedagogy, Disability and Communication: Applying Disability Studies in the Classroom (2017) and International Perspectives on Teaching with Disability: Overcoming Obstacles and Enriching Lives (2018), all in Routledge’s Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series.