Showing results for "the world" in People with Disabilities

The modern world is built for neurotypicals. Needless noise, bright flashing lights, small talk, implication and ‘unwritten rules’; it can be a nightmarish dystopia as far as the autistic population is concerned. In Untypical, Pete Wharmby lays bare the experience of being ‘different’, explaining with wit and warmth just how exhausting it is to fit into a world not designed for you.

Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept. Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder it? How is mental well-being, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time? These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today’s 'awareness raising' campaigns.

Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents.

Drawing insights from the hard-won wisdom of disabled folks who've forged difference into fierce and luminous cultural dissent, Belser offers fresh and unexpected interpretations of familiar biblical stories, showing how disability wisdom can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with the complexities of the flesh. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame, challenging interpretations that demean disabled people and diminish the vitality of disabled lives.

In The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, founder of Diversability and creator of the viral TikTok Anti-Ableism series Tiffany Yu takes listeners on a revelatory examination of disability. Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have too often been 'othered' and rendered invisible

Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former managing director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."

We think of perception as a passive, mechanical process, as if our eyes are cameras and our ears microphones. But as neurobiologist Susan R. Barry argues, perception is a deeply personal act. Our environments, our relationships, and our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives. This idea is no more apparent than in the cases of people who gain senses as adults. Barry tells the stories of Liam McCoy, practically blind from birth, and Zohra Damji, born deaf, in the decade following surgeries that restored their senses.

Roger Dykes has spent his entire life living in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy, yet his accomplishments are many. He has studied law, and has been a teacher and counselor most of his adult life. He has achieved his Master’s Degree in Family Relations at Texas Tech University. He has enjoyed some notoriety during his time as a wheelchair-bound comic and after-dinner speaker. He has owned and operated a record store and has written an enlightening book about life as a disabled person, or he calls it “a non-person.”

But You Look So Normal is the inspiring story of a life affected, but not defined, by an invisible disability. It is a journey through family, loss, shame, identity, love, and healing as Claudia finally, joyfully, finds her place in the world.

Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindness. As part of her research, she spent three months teaching at Tenberken's international training center for blind adults in Kerala, India, an experience that reveals both the shocking oppression endured by the world's blind, as well as their great resilience.