Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness

Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. Beyond simply theorizing, this work begins to unearth a potent and in-depth examination of membership, meaning and social valuation on the basis of embodied features that include desirables in and exclude “offending” bodies from membership in the category of human. It invokes contemporary post-postmodernist marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking disability as part of the fabric of humanness.

Elizabeth DePoy is a professor at the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies, the School of Social Work and cooperating faculty in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maine. Within Disability Studies her teaching and scholarship focus on methods of inquiry and progressive analysis of disability.

Stephen Gilson is professor and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Disability Studies program in the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies and professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Maine. His primary scholarship analyzes the role of design and aesthetics in creating disability as a human category.