Children and Young People's Cultural Worlds by
Children and young people in the early twenty-first century encounter, and creatively adapt to, a range of cultural phenomena in an increasingly mediated, commercialised and globalised world. Children and young people's cultural worlds offers a critical introduction to childhood in the digital age. Childhood innocence is a concept that often underpins the way adults think about children and new technologies. The book challenges adult concerns, highlighting instead the diversity of children's experiences and relationships with each other. Children's everyday activities are explored, in an attempt to understand the distinctiveness of their cultural worlds. The book also considers matters of difference on children's lives; the consequences of age and the experience of living in different cultural contexts. This is the second in a series of four books, written by experts in the field, which provides an introduction to childhood degree programmes and related modules. The series features international case studies, examples and readings to supplement the chapters, and is illustrated in full colour. Other books in the series are:· Understanding childhood: a cross-disciplinary approach· Childhoods in context· Local childhoods, global issues
Scapegoat: Why we are failing disabled people by
Every few months there's a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It's easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable and fundamental truth about how our society treats its most unequal citizens. In Scapegoat, Katharine Quarmby looks behind the headlines to question and understand our discomfort with disabled people. Combining fascinating examples from history with tenacious investigation and powerful first person interviews, Scapegoat will change the way we think about disability - and about the changes we must make as a society to ensure that disabled people are seen as equal citizens, worthy of respect, not targets for taunting, torture and attack.
Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality by 
Foucault and the Government of Disability by
Foucault and the Government of Disability considers the continued relevance of Foucault to disability studies, as well as the growing significance of disability studies to understandings of Foucault. A decade ago, this international collection provocatively responded to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating. The book's contributors draw on Foucault to scrutinize a range of widely endorsed practices and ideas surrounding disability, including rehabilitation, community care, impairment, normality and abnormality, inclusion, prevention, accommodation, and special education. In this revised and expanded edition, four new essays extend and elaborate the lines of inquiry by problematizing (to use Foucault's term) the epistemological, political, and ethical character of the supercrip, the racialized war on autism, the performativity of intellectual disability, and the potent mixture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in the context of physician-assisted suicide. "[A]n important, prescient, and necessary contribution...a kind of litmus test for the efficacy of Foucault's concepts in the study of disability, concepts that lead to a refusal of the biological essentialism implied in the disability/impairment binary." --Foucault Studies "Tremain has done an exceptional job at organizing and procuring important, rigorously argued, and entertaining essays.... This book should be a mandatory read for anyone interested in contemporary philosophical debates surrounding the experience of disability." --Essays in Philosophy "A beautiful exploration of how Foucault's analytics of power and genealogies of discursive knowledges can open up new avenues for thinking critically about phenomena that many of us take to be inevitable and thus new ways of resisting and possibly at times redirecting the forces that shape our lives. Every scholar, every person with an interest in Foucault or in political theory generally, needs to read this book." --Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond
Stuff by
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.
