New book: Gail Landsman, "Reconstructing Motherhood"

[Image description: Book cover featuring a Picasso-esque image of a mother and baby, in overlapping squares of color, with blue predominating.]

I've found Gail Landsman's journal articles useful and insightful for years; I've cited them and shared them with students and friends. So I'm pleased to note that Landsman's got a new book out today, Reconstructing Motherhood and Disability in the Age of "Perfect" Babies (Routledge 2008). Landsman is an anthropologist who studies mothers whose babies have diagnoses such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, and how they (we!) revise or reinvent their (our!) ideas about parenting and personhood after learning such diagnoses. (Or not, I guess; some don't.) The chapter titles are a good indication of her topics, but don't communicate the abundance of real, honest, human voices in Landsman's work--including her own. I've probably read article versions of some of these, but it's still going on my wishlist.

New book: Geoffrey Reaume, "Lyndhurst"

News in the inbox today about Canadian disability historian Geoffrey Reaume's new book, Lyndhurst: Canada's First Rehabilitation Centre for People with Spinal Cord Injuries, 1945-1998 (McGill-Queens University Press 2007). Reaume is an assistant professor at York University, where he teaches Mad People's History in the Critical Disability Studies MA program. He's one of the organizers of the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto. His previous book, Remembrance of Patients Past (Oxford University Press 2000), explores patient life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane.

About Lyndhurst, from the publisher's website:

Only recently have the voices of the disabled - the personal experiences of people with disabilities - been included in medical history. Lyndhurst marks an important contribution to disability and medical history by providing first-person accounts of patients, staff, and disability activists at Lyndhurst Lodge in Toronto in post-war Canada.

Lyndhurst was the first facility in Canada to focus solely on people with spinal cord injuries, eventually also treating people with related disabilities, such as polio. Geoffrey Reaume details the changes in treatment of paraplegia and quadriplegia that allowed more people to survive and to return to the community, the evolution of social policies that emphasized greater inclusiveness in society for people with physical disabilities, and the role of disability activism in helping to advance these changes.

Lyndhurst is the first Canadian history to trace these developments through the mid to late twentieth century. It is a timely reminder of the past role of government, the health care sector, and disability activists in shaping disability social policies.

Auspicious Developments

Just reading of the "blogging news" can consume your life. But one of the bytes that penetrated my consciousness over holiday break was the prognostication that we have now hit a stabilization point for blogging. The point had been reached where the number of time-tested blogs fading out roughly equalled the number of blogs making their debut.

When Disability Studies, Temple University made its debut nearly 2 and 3/4 years ago with this humble post, blogging just beginning to hit the big time, and a number of educators in disparate fields, but particularly in literary fields such as English, where turning to blogs as a way to reach a broader audience and to facilitate group work. Blogs chronicling the disability experience, let along the field of disability studies, were in their infancy. Much of the interchange in the field of Disability Studies took place through the medium of listserves. A tremendous amount of energy continues to be devoted to discussion on listserves such as Disability-Research out of Leeds, and DS-HUM (Disability Studies in the Humanities) and SDS (open to members of the Society for Disability Studies) in the United States, that operate as members-only clubs. The content of these often exciting and useful exchanges is lost to the much broader community of non-subscribing Disability Studies acolytes. In my own modest way, I set out to change that.

Perhaps the credit for getting DS,TU off the ground should go to Lydia Fecteau, an adjuct faculty member at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey : she created an excellent blog for her Disability and Literature course that is still in our blogroll, and shared the interesting blogs created by students at her school. Or perhaps credit should go to a reference librarian here at Temple University, Brian Schoolar, who started posting his news to a page directed at faculty in the College of Education. Brian gave me a lot of useful tips in the early days, and we conducted an initial training, "Introduction to Weblogs and Blogging," for faculty, staff and students in the College of Education. Brian eventually discontinued the College of Education blog: I think he found his efforts to be a little bit premature, since faculty in our college were still largely unaware of blogs, and certainly did not subscribe to RSS readers.

Of course, the entire tone and feel of the blog changed soon after Penny Richards submitted her first post [Saturday, Apr 16, 2005] and we got serious. Keep posted - we look forward to celebrating our 'anniversaries' later in the spring.

What triggers these reflections? In this month's Disability Blog Carnival #7, Penny notes several comrades including Gimpy Mumpy who have set their keyboards aside and directed their energies otherwise. And now word emerges that one of the post prolific bloggers of the past three years, Michael Berube, is following suit. His blog archives will remain, but active blogging ceased as of Tue, Jan 9 2007. Fittingly enough, given the critical political tenor of many of his posts, Michael signing off with a YouTube with the famous atomic bomb finale from Dr. Strangelove, under the moniker "I told you it was going to happen."

Don't worry - we don't show any signs of flagging yet.

2007: The Year Ahead in Disability Studies

What's on the horizon in this new year? I've been taking a surf around to find some highlights--get your calendars and book orders ready:

CONFERENCES:
April 7-9
7th Annual Disability Studies in Education Conference
Chicago

April 11-13
150 Years on Kendall Green: Celebrating Deaf History and Gallaudet
Washington DC

May 31-June 2
20th Annual Society for Disability Studies Conference
Seattle

PUBLICATIONS:
Douglas Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, Jean Lindquist Bergey, Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (Gallaudet University Press 2007).

Brenda Brueggemann and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, eds., Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook (Bedford St. Martins 2007).

Hilary Cooper, Divided Portraits: Identity and Disability (Umbrage 2007).

Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, eds. Disability in Local and Global Worlds (University of California Press 2007).

Paul Jacobs, Neither-Nor: A Young Australian's Experience with Deafness (Gallaudet University Press 2007).

Petra Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Arts (University of Minnesota Press 2007).

Raymond Luczak, ed. When I am Dead: The Writings of George M. Teegarden (Gallaudet University Press 2007, part of the Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies series).

Martin F. Norden, ed. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television (Editions Rodopi 2007).

Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture (University of Michigan Press 2007).

Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press 2007).

Carol Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (Palgrave MacMillan 2007).

Tanya Titchkosky, Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment (University of Toronto Press 2007).

Watermeyer, Brian, and Leslie Swartz, eds. Disability and Social Change: A South African Agenda (Human Sciences Research Council 2007).

Weber, Mark C. Disability Harassment (NYU Press 2007).

NEW JOURNALS:
Journal of Literary Disability
Disability Studies and Special Education

Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage, Berkeley, November 30

If you're in the Bay Area next Thursday, you won't want to miss attending a reading and discussion at Mrs. Dalloway's bookstore in Berkeley, where Georgina Kleege will be talking about her new book, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Gallaudet University Press 2006, cover shown at left).

Wheelchair Dancer just this week posted the first paragraph of Blind Rage--go have a read. And you may also want to check out Kleege's earlier book of essays about blindness, Sight Unseen (Yale University Press 1999).

Remembering Anarcha

Petra Kuppers posted this announcement today on DS-Hum (I added the links):

Remembering Anarcha
Sunday, 14th May 2006, 5-7
Free
Theatre, Taylor Center
Auburn University, Montgomery AL

Black history, disability studies and performance scholars work together to remember Montgomery women Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.

Come and join us for a discussion of Anarcha and J. Marion Sims, the gynecologist who used slave women as experimental subjects while searching for a cure for fistula.

We would love to hear from you about what you know about this story, how the local sites are marked, what the story means to you, how you remember it locally, and how you see its effects on race relations and medical practices today.

And we would love to tell and show you how we go about using movement, words and visuals to connect Anarcha's story to disability culture history and black history.

Petra Kuppers (Associate Professor, English, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Anita Gonzalez (Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance, State University of New York – New Paltz)
Carrie Sandahl (Associate Professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University, Tallahassee)

***********
And while we're mentioning Carrie Sandahl.... Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (University of Michigan Press 2005), co-edited by Carrie Sandahl and Phil Auslander, was just awarded the Best Book Prize for 2006 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. It's part of the Corporealities series of disability studies scholarship from the University of Michigan Press (David L. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, series editors). Congratulations to all involved!