Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday

Many critical analyses of disability address important ‘macro’ concerns, but are often far removed from an interactional and micro-level focus. Written by leading scholars in the field, and containing a range of theoretical and empirical contributions from around the world, this book focuses on the taken-for-granted, mundane human activities at the heart of how social life is reproduced, and how this impacts on the lives of those with a disability, family members, and other allies. It departs from earlier accounts by making sense of how disability is lived, mobilised, and enacted in everyday lives. Although broad in focus and navigating diverse social contexts, chapters are united by a concern with foregrounding micro, mundane moments for making sense of powerful discourses, practices, affects, relations, and world-making for disabled people and their allies. Using different examples – including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, dementia, polio, and Parkinson’s disease – contributions move beyond a simplified narrow classification of disability which creates rigid categories of existence and denies bodily variation. Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday should be considered essential reading for disability studies students and academics, as well as professionals involved in health and social care. With contributions located within new and familiar debates around embodiment, stigma, gender, identity, inequality, care, ethics, choice, materiality, youth, and representation, this book will be of interest to academics from different disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, humanities, public health, allied health professions, science and technology studies, social work, and social policy.

'This is a ‘must read’ book that draws attention to everyday life with disability and disablism - across the globe. It crosses social science borders to enrich our understanding of disability diversity in original and informative ways.' - Carol Thomas, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University‘Sakellariou and Thomas' book is an important emergent approach to disability studies scholarship that is of translational relevance across the social sciences and the applied health professions. It is a fresh new approach that, at the same time, takes us back to disability studies’ very foundations in the critical social sciences engagement with disability. The authors reveal experiences -- toileting, dressing and other obscured but crucial moments of daily life — as both meaningful in highly individual ways and to have shared resonance for disabled people collectively.’ - Pamela Block, Professor and Director, Disability Studies Concentration, Stony Brook University

Gareth M. Thomas is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He is a sociologist interested in medicine, disability, stigma, reproduction, and place. His first research monograph – Down's Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic – was published by Routledge in March 2017. Dikaios Sakellariou is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He is interested in health inequalities, experiences of disability and disablement, and the intersubjective nature of care practices. He has co-authored and co-edited the volumes A Political Practice of Occupational Therapy and Occupational Therapies without Borders (with Nick Pollard and Frank Kronenberg), and Politics of Occupation-Centred Practice (with Nick Pollard).