This study analyzed representations of disability and emotional support animals in the one-season Netflix children’s television show The Healing Powers of Dude (2020) through an inductive content analysis. The show followed Noah, an eleven-year-old boy with social anxiety disorder, as he navigated middle school with Dude, his emotional support nonhuman animal. Through the lens of cultivation theory and disability stereotypes, two main themes were identified. The first was disability as a burden to authority figures, with the subthemes of disability as something to isolate; for example, the support dog was portrayed as a problem for the principal, forcing Noah into isolation during lunchtime. The second overarching theme of “humor” included hyper-acting parents that pretended to have anxieties for entertainment purposes and Dude being used as a tool for humor and heartfelt heroism that saved a helpless disabled boy. The concepts of “entertainment” could be seen in how Dude performed dog tricks for laughs or had animated fights with other people and dogs. Although the show depicted Noah’s disability and accommodations in negative ways, Noah’s friends fostered a safe friendship environment where they offered solutions. Additionally, one friend in a wheelchair was depicted in empowering and counter-stereotypical ways, compared to how Noah’s non-apparent disability was depicted in a problematic way.

Followers and admirers of L'Arche, an international network of communities for adults with intellectual disabilities, were shocked and saddened to learn of allegations of sexual abuse against its founder, Jean Vanier, that surfaced in 2020. This article examines aspects of L'Arche's history as well as its discourse and practices that may have contributed to the perpetration and hiding of abuse that took place over decades. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary scholarship, I discuss the abuse that happened in L'Arche not as a historical aberration but as an example of the spectrum of care and violence that exists in all caregiving situations. Further, I consider what this story reveals about the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities, and the supports they need, continue to be interpreted and understood, and what this means moving forward.

Which linguistic labels we use to name ourselves and others – such as disabled and non-disabled – make a difference regarding how we see ourselves and each other. Such labels may also say something about how we view society and the roles of people in it, as illustrated by the choice between people-first and identity-first labels. In the present study, we use a sample of 56,666 articles published by Swedish print media to investigate how the concept and category of dis/ability is referred to and understood in Swedish. The data stretches over four decades, from 1982 to 2019, and is analysed using the two research fields of Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The study shows that the overall terms to name dis/ability and disablised people in Swedish have changed regularly, while the underlying concepts, structures and ways of categorisation regarding dis/ability remain the same. Dis/ability is shown to be understood along a medical-biological model as located in the individual. Ability is rarely mentioned. These results suggest that any attempts at changing mainstream society's conceptualisations of dis/ability need to involve more work than just replacing outdated or offensive words by new ones. The results also suggest a need for making tacit ableist norms explicit if they are to be challenged.

The South Korean government used the burangin [vagrants] label to justify their massive wave of forced institutionalizations in the 1980s that resulted in countless abuses and many hundreds of deaths. The survivors' legal battles continue as the state, while no longer arresting so-called "vagrants," has never rectified the crimes of that period. Universal deinstitutionalization remains a controversial proposition in South Korea as the public is generally unaware of fundamental problems inherent in the practice of institutionalization itself. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the discourse of vagrants in South Korean newspapers in the 1980s. While police cracked down on alleged vagrancy, the news media constructed the vagrant as an unsightly object, a threatening figure, and a target for rehabilitation. This article also discusses oppressive power mechanisms around this discourse which connects to issues of ableism and disability.

No abstract available.

Neurodivergent people often feel they don’t belong. This is not just an emotional response to neurotypical norms, but a matter of “misfit” embodiment in particular places (Garland-Thomson, 2011). Recent empirical research adopting a neurodiversity critique is beginning to examine neurodivergent spatialities in increasingly substantive ways. Often space is a static container for the discourses and practices that shape neurodivergent people’s lives. Unmarked whiteness often accompanies this approach to space. However, space becomes a much more active presence when examining the experiences of racialized neurodivergent people. Strategies of spatial containment have long been central to regulating racialized and other oppressed groups. However, “container-space” on its own is inadequate for understanding the different risks and outcomes that different neurodivergent individuals face, especially when exhibiting neurodivergent comportment and emotions. Other work builds on these critical insights by seeking to affirm neurodivergent ways of relating to the world. Here, often borrowing from ideas of queer and crip time, scholars show how space can shape how people are continually becoming as embodied subjects over time. This scholarship invites us to ask how specifically neurodivergent forms of agency might emerge from the mutual relationship between embodiment, time and space. Deeper engagement with material space through intersectional thinking and more robust attention to space when exploring alternative temporalities are needed not only to understand how neurodivergent people can be misfits, but also how they may thrive.

Fathers' relationships with their disabled children is a neglected topic in the academic literature. This article is the first review of studies in the field, comprising a comprehensive overview of research published since 1980. Forty-five studies met the inclusion criteria. Although fathers emphasise positive aspects of their relationships, existing research foregrounds more negative aspects. These studies tend to identify five themes that signal positive father-child relationships. These themes are: an evolving relationship; caregiving practices; relational aspects of caregiving; recognising and supporting their children's agency; and (inter)connectedness. While fathers' relationships with their disabled children is an under-researched topic, the existing literature on the topic focuses on the negative impact of having a disabled child. Understanding the complexity and rewarding aspects of fathers' engagement warrants further research.

This article explores how Black women experienced and theorized disability from within Alabama’s prisons in the early twentieth century. Early-twentieth-century custodial prisons were a primary place in which disabled, southern Black women encountered the state. Some women entered prison disabled and many left with disabilities they had not had before. Indeed, disability was a condition of incarceration: a function of its punitive labor demands and the violence used to enforce disciplinary measures. Black women intimately understood and resisted this multifaceted violence and attempted to negotiate with the state for their release. Their handwritten letters, an archive that was unintentionally preserved by the state, demonstrate that incarcerated Black women’s articulation of uselessness was a profound critique of racial, carceral capitalism. Through close reading of recursive strategies, this article examines incarcerated Black women’s textual invocations of unproductivity as a disruption of the binary of metaphor and materiality in racial studies of disability.

This essay analyzes (dis)ability at the intersection of colonialism, afro-religiosity, and literary studies to reassess illness and (dis)ability under histories of racialization. I approach Nelly Rosario’s novel Song of the Water Saints (2002) as a “texto montado” (possessed text), following Lorgia García Peña (2016), to suggest an alternative reading of (dis)ability in diasporic texts, particularly in relation to Afro-religiosity and colonial violence. By bringing together the history of colonial erasure of Afro-religiosity and violence against Black and poor women, this essay examines the stages of syphilis on the protagonist’s, Graciela, body and life alongside the material impacts of U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). If readers are to take the story of Graciela’s life as one of the erased and unrecorded narratives in the colonial archives, how do we make sense of the otherworldly ontology accessed through (dis)abilities offered toward the end of Graciela’s life? Rosario’s novel is a practice of truth-telling and a resistance against the erasure of Dominican women’s stories of violence and power. Finally, this essay demonstrates the possibilities of bringing together Afro-religious ontologies and disability studies to expand our understanding of (dis)ability as a condition of becoming imbricated within colonial and imperial history.