This guide highlights Dickinson library resources, including books, films, and databases, for expanding our understanding of social justice issues, so that we can combat discrimination in all its forms. You can discover more resources on the library website. If you would like help finding additional information sources, or if you wish to recommend additional resources, please contact a librarian for assistance.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
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A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience: Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art ... an ingenious way to live."
Don't Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back
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Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law
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The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage.
The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me
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From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America.
Sitting Pretty
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From disability advocate with a PhD in disability studies and creative nonfiction, and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, an essay collection based on a lifetime of experiences in a paralyzed body, tackling themes of identity, accessibility, bodies, and representation.
I Hear the Sunspot
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Because of a hearing disability, Kohei is often misunderstood and has trouble integrating into life on campus, so he learns to keep his distance. That is until he meets the outspoken and cheerful Taichi. He tells Kohei that his hearing loss is not his fault. Taichi's words cut through Kohei's usual defense mechanisms and open his heart. More than friends, less than lovers, their relationship changes Kohei forever.
Panpocalypse
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In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman bikes through a locked-down New York City in search of connection.
The Oracle Code: A Graphic Novel
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After a gunshot leaves her paralyzed below the waist, Barbara Gordon undergoes physical and mental rehabilitation at the Arkham Center for Independence. She must adapt to a new normal, but she cannot shake the feeling that something is dangerously amiss. Strange sounds escape at night while patients start to go missing. Is this suspicion simply a result of her trauma? Or does Barbara actually hear voices coming from the center's labyrinthine hallways?
A History of Disability
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The first book to attempt to provide a framework for analyzing disability through the ages, Henri-Jacques Stiker's now classic A History of Disability traces the history of western cultural responses to disability, from ancient times to the present. The sweep of the volume is broad; from a rereading and reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth to legislation regarding disability, Stiker proposes an analytical history that demonstrates how societies reveal themselves through their attitudes towards disability in unexpected ways.
A Disability History of the United States
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Covers the entirety of U.S. disability history, from pre-1492 to the present. Disability is not just the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. It places the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative. In many ways, it's a familiar telling. In other ways, however, it is a radical repositioning of U.S. history.
No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s
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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as unproductive citizens. Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle , a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve self-care and self-support.
Ableist Rhetoric
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Examines the rhetorical practices that generate and sustain discrimination against disabled people. Demonstrates how ableist values, knowledge, and ways of seeing pervade Western culture and influence social institutions such as law, sport, and religion.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
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In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award–winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
Disabled upon Arrival
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A rhetorical examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century. Links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics--and argues racist and ableist ideas about bodily values have never really gone away.
Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction
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Traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory and disability studies, th author demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations.
Do You Read Me?
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Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer
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The Disability Justice Primer offers concrete suggestions for moving beyond the socialization of ableism, such as mobilizing against police violence, how to commit to mixed ability organizing, and access suggestions for events. Skin, Tooth, and Bone offers analysis, history and context for the growing Disability Justice Movement.
