Disabling barriers : social movements, disability history, and the law

Malhotra, Ravi (Professor) (Added Author). Isitt, Benjamin, 1978- (Added Author).

Summary: Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists demonstrate that disabled people can change their social status by transforming the political and legal discourse surrounding disablement. Traditionally, disabled people were regarded as objects of pity and condescension. The rise of the social model of disablement--which identifies barriers, rather than physiological impairments, as the main problem facing people with disabilities--has resulted in a dramatic reconfiguration of how we regard political and legal structures affecting people with disabilities. Employing tools from the fields of law and history, this volume explores how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers' compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers).

Record details

ISBN: 9780774835244 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0774835249 (Paperback)
Physical Description: print
xii, 227 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Publisher: Vancouver, BC : UBC Press, 2017.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Introduction: Bringing history and law into disability studies -- Part 1 : Historical debates on work and disability -- Bearing the marks of capital : solidarities and fractures in E.T. Kingsley's British Columbia -- Employers, disabled workers, and the war on attitudes in late twentieth century Canada -- Gender and the value of work in Canadian disability history -- Part 2 : Debates in disability studies -- Dancing with a cane : the public perception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's disability -- Disability in motion : aesthetics, embodiment, sensation, and the emergence of modern vestibular science in the nineteen century -- "Of dark type and poor physique" : law, immigration restriction, and disability in Canada, 1900-30 -- Part 3 : Legal debates -- Battling the warrior-litigator : an exploration of chronic illness and employment discrimination paradigms -- Towards full inclusion : addressing the issue of income inequality for people with disabilities in Canada -- Compensating work-related disability : the theory, politics, and history of the commodification-decommodification dialectic.