Changing Social Attitudes toward Disability is a fascinating edited volume with contributions from 15 authors, each presenting a well-written and thought-provoking insight into their academic world. The book’s greatest strength is giving an academic reader an opportunity to gain flashes of light and insights from multiple perspectives, all of which are relevant to the task of changing social attitudes toward disability.
Barod Community Interest Company asked to review this edited volume because we thought, from the title, that it was a how-to guide on using different perspectives as part of the fight to change current social attitudes. We had planned a two-perspective book review (activist with learning difficulty plus neurodiverse semi-academic). It took us a while to realise that the book is less about knowledge transfer from academia to activists and more about sparking cross-disciplinary insights within academic thinking. At that point we considered handing the book back, but decided to ask one of our worker-directors (Anne, the semi-academic) to dig deeper because we believe that if Disability Studies is to have an emancipatory role then volumes like this need to be read by people like us – even if they are intended for a more academic audience.
The 15 chapters are all by different authors, all well written, all thought-provoking and each brought at least one ‘a-ha’ moment of new insight. The chapters are arranged in three five-chapter sections: history, culture and education. The breadth of approaches within each section is at least as great as the difference between sections. The golden thread running throughout the volume is very much the theme of culture in its broader sociological meaning.
To get the most from this volume, each chapter needs to be read on its own terms and given time for its ideas to be digested. Rushing through the book is likely to give serious indigestion and conceptual confusion. Allowing time between chapters will pay dividends in sparking new ideas and ways of thinking.
The history section includes chapters addressing evolutionary anthropology (David Doat), changing historic portrayals of a historic character (Alex Tankard), an exploration of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme (Emmeline Burdett), photojournalism (Alice Hall) and a particularly memorable contribution from Catherine Prendergast relating to her personal history.
The culture section focuses on the arts, particularly literature, rather than social theories of culture – possibly due to editorial choice but perhaps revealing a gap in current disability scholarship. The chapters look at the ‘hunchback’ (Tom Coogan – personal thanks for reminding me to talk about this with my teenage Shakespeare-studying daughter!), cyborgs (Sue Smith), collaborative life narratives (Stella Bolaki), European literature (Pauline Eyre) and the cultural use of ‘blindness’ to focus our attention on sight (David Bolt).
The education section deals with both practical and conceptual issues, from the ableism of school intranets (Alan Hodkinson) to a fascinating chapter on ‘dyslexia’ as a social construct (Craig Collinson), with chapters contributed about art education (Claire Penketh), ‘challenging’ pupils (Marie Caslin) and an attempt to explain organisation social attitudes towards disability through the lens of ‘dysrationalia’ (Owen Barden).
Some of the chapters are more accessible to a general audience than others. For example, Alice Hall’s chapter ‘Disability and Photojournalism in the Age of the Image’ and Alan Hodkinson’s chapter, ‘Ethnic Cleansing; Disability and the Colonisation of the Intranet’ were very easy for me to summarise to my Barod colleagues. Other chapters, such as Stella Bolaki’s ‘The Cultural Work of Disability and Illness Memoirs’, assumed a high level of familiarity with concepts and language that were unfamiliar to me. These chapters made for a challenging and tiring, but ultimately rewarding read.
As an edited volume, the selection of content confirmed our feelings that people with learning difficulties are still (largely) marginalised both within the disability rights movement and within academic circles. While the language used by others of us is discussed in David Bolt’s Introduction, as people we have no voice in this volume. From the title, we had thought Owen Barden’s chapter (‘Dysrationalia: An Institutional Learning Disability?’) might have been our voice, but we were left confused by the title’s apparent use of ‘learning disability’ as a negative metaphor for irrational social attitudes of/within institutions. One lasting impression will be the truth of Bolt’s introductory comments about disabling social attitudes being maintained by ‘people who are disabled and people who are not disabled alike’.
The jewels in the volume, for us, were David Bolt’s introduction and epilogue. In the Introduction he manages to explain ableism and disablism so clearly that I finally grasped their profound theoretical and practical differences and now have ways to explain them to everyone I meet. With my activist hat I would have to say that the Epilogue by itself would make it worth buying the book. Bolt articulates the concept of ‘accessible attitudes’ by telling the story of a restaurant visit. His story gave us a framework and words that we have used successfully as we work to change social attitudes.
Were we the best people to review this book? Almost definitely not – and for that we apologise to the authors. Would we recommend it to others? Definitely, to any scholar willing to open their minds beyond their own approach to disability studies. Most readers will be familiar with their own approach to disability studies. This volume is a magnificent introduction to other people’s approaches – enough to whet the appetite and identify new perspectives you may wish to explore.
Barod Community Interest Company and School of Social Science, Bangor University, Bangor, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Anne Collis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1167362