Towards Enabling Geographies ‘Disabled’ Bodies and Minds in Society and Space

Over the past 15 years, geography has made many significant contributions to our understanding of disabled people's identities, lives, and place in society and space. 'Towards Enabling Geographies' brings together leading scholars to showcase the 'second wave' of geographical studies concerned with disability and embodied differences. This area has broadened and challenged conventional boundaries of 'disability', expanding the kinds of embodied differences considered, while continuing to grapple with important challenges such as policy relevance and the use of more inclusionary research approaches. This book demonstrates the value of a spatial conceptualization of disability and disablement to a broader social science audience, whilst examining how this conceptualization can be further developed and refined.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: towards enabling geographies, Vera Chouinard, Edward Hall and Robert Wilton; Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home, Rob Imrie; Women's changing experiences of the home and life inside it after becoming chronically ill, Valorie A Crooks; Enabling cultures of dis/order online, Joyce Davidson and Hester Parr; 'It's my umbilical cord to the world ... the internet': d/deaf and hard of hearing people's information and communication practices, Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine; The geographies of interdependence in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, Andrew Power; 563 miles: a matter of long-distance caring by siblings of siblings with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Deborah Metzel; Young people with socio-emotional differences: theorising disability and destabilising socio-emotional norms, Louise Holt; Evaluating workfare: disability, policy and the role of geography, Claire Edwards; Placing little people: dwarfism and the geographies of everyday life, Robert J. Kruse II; The disabling affects of fat: the emotional and material geographies of some women who live in Hamilton, New Zealand, Robyn Longhurst; Embodied ageing in place: what does it mean to grow old?, Janine L. Wiles and Ruth E.S. Allen; Biometric geographies, mobility and disability: biologies of culpability and the biologised spaces of (post)modernity, Joanne Maddern and Emma Stewart; Geographies of disability: reflections on new body knowledges, Isabel Dyck; Index.

Vera Chouinard, Professor, School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Canada, Dr. Edward Hall, Geography, School of Social and Environmental Sciences, University of Dundee, UK and Robert Wilton, McMaster University, Canada.