Placing Disability

Placing Disability presents an international collection of personal essays that address the experience of disability in particular geographical locations. Each chapter engages the question of what it means to be disabled in a specific place, exploring issues of movement, work and play, community and activism, artistic production, love and marriage, access and social services, family and friendship, memory and aging—all informed by the places that people inhabit. The book is organized in terms of topographies and vistas, rather than being bound by the map, to emphasize the defining, constitutive effects of place. The authors included in Placing Disability hail from different countries, neighborhoods, climates, and landscapes; from various backgrounds and professions; from a range of disciplinary perspectives and strategies. They are trained as academics, literary critics, poets, students, public speakers, memoirists, educators, philosophers, administrators, and activists. Their essays refine our understanding of the complex dynamic between self and circumstance as they survey the impact of geographical region on their life experiences. This book is intended to be useful in creative-writing workshops, Disability Studies seminars, and classes on environmental literature, and to appeal to general readers of memoir as well as to scholars of contemporary body theory or the Anthropocene.

1. Preface; Susannah B. Mintz and Gregory Fraser.- 2. Disability and Memoir; G. Thomas Couser.- 3. Disability and Space; Rob Imrie.- Part 1: Into the Wide Open.- 4. Learning the Camino Real—Disability and the Desert; Sheila Black.- 5. Headlamps and Fireside Light; Rachel Kolb.- 6. A Sense of Place and Cyberspace: The Hybrid Way I Live, Work, and Play; Gyasi Burks-Abbott.- 7. Ad Astra Per Aspera (To the Stars Through Difficulties); Brenda Jo Brueggemann.- Part 2: Metro-Geographies.- 8. Peaks and Valleys: A Collaborative Essay about Disability in the Bronx; Annette Serrano, Cindy Hernandez, Andrew Whyte, Sonia Gonzalez, Jovan Campbell, and Mary Morfe (with an introduction by Julia Miele Rodas).- 9. Blindness and Dyslexia in the Movements of Everyday Life in Toronto; Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky.- 10. Disability in New York City Schools and Preparing Teachers to Work in Them; Laurie Rabinowitz.- 11. Drenched Lands, Blood Compost: Disability, Land, and the Asylum Project; Petra Kuppers.- Part 3: Liminal (Dis)locations.- 12. A Tide in the River: Auditory Ecologies of Dyarubbin; Nicole Matthews.- 13. Hydra, New Hampshire; Stephen Kuusisto.- 14. Between Places; Leigh A. Neithardt.- 15. The Lie of the Land; Annmaree Watharow.- 16. Body Workers; Ellen Samuels.- 17. Never in one Place: On Waking in a Different Body; Anand Prahlad.