Colin Cameron

Disability Studies: a student's guide

Bringing together a range of expert voices to tackle the essential topics relevant to the study of disability from a social perspective, this interdisciplinary introduction includes over 50 chapters relevant across health and social care.

Another way of looking

This article presents a discussion that emerged in response to a dilemma faced by an experienced social work lecturer in planning an introductory life course lecture about people labelled as having learning disabilities. The dilemma related to whether or not to begin with a quote from a parent reflecting on her own feelings shortly after her twin children, aged six months, had been identified as having a congenital impairment. The statement, reproduced below, was made 13 years later, and involved a recollection of how the mother had felt when seeing a display of skipping ropes in a department store. A discussion ensued concerning how ways of thinking about impairment can be informed by the affirmative model of disability, a recent theoretical development within disability studies. The article takes the form of a dialogic exchange where the affirmative model is presented and examined as an alternative to the way disability has traditionally been understood in social work education. The aim is to illustrate the application of the affirmative model and to provide disabled people/social workers/families with a theoretical tool with which to look differently at impairment and disability and to challenge some traditional assumptions and practices.

Disability arts: the building of critical community politics and identity

This chapter examines the disability arts movement in Great Britain as an example of a self-organised, critically conscious community established with political aims: around the rights of disabled people to access, inclusion and respect. It considers the role of disability arts in forging individual and collective identities grounded in a re-evaluation of the meaning of disability. It also explores ways in which disability arts have challenged dominant representations of disabled, and is illustrated by reflections on poems by the disabled writer Sue Napolitano. The affirmation model, a theoretical development expressing the distinct social critique emerging from disability arts, is outlined as a tool for making sense of disabling assumptions, encounters and practices in everyday life. The chapter concludes by suggesting that perspectives developed by disabled people can offer an opportunity for reflection on the emancipatory potential of community development practice.

Harassment and Hate Crime

Since that time, significant changes have occurred in relevant statutes, case law, and Department policy guidance. For example, the guidance does not reflect the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education and subsequent federal case law, new or revised federal civil-rights and hate-crimes statutes, such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and other federal and state laws that have been enacted or revised since 1999.