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Though Community Asset Mapping (CAM) has been widely used in community-development and applied to public health interventions, little has been done to synthesize the current state of this approach. This paper reports the findings from a scoping review of research where CAM was applied to public health practice and research initiatives. We identified and reviewed 28 articles featuring studies that used asset mapping for public health purposes. Overall, we found that the purpose and methods related to asset mapping varied widely across studies. Given the potential benefits of asset mapping and its relevance to social work principles, researchers and public health professionals should approach asset mapping with the same level of attention, rigor, and ethics as other research methodologies or intervention design. There is an obligation to engage in asset mapping in ways that promote our ethical principles of service, dignity, integrity, and competence.

True to the field of Cultural Disability Studies in Education (CDSE), this project adopts an explicitly interdisciplinary approach in order to explore representations of disability and the related ...

A few of years ago I was invited to contribute a paper to David Mitchell’s panel at the Society for Disability Studies Conference, Minneapolis, 2014, entitled Non-Normative Positivisms: Towards a Methodology of Critical Embodiment, the SDS panel to which I refer throughout this chapter also included work by Stephanie Kerschbaum and the late Tobin Siebers. The premise was that the concept of non-normative positivisms would open up a space from which we could sketch out an alternative ethics about why and how disabled lives matter (Mitchell 2014). Though appreciative of the salient assertion that disabled people must be allowed to pursue our lives much as non-disabled people pursue their lives, the panel set out to argue that in practice this ethical trajectory is defined by limitations and serves to bolster the desirability of the normate subject position. At the time of this invitation I was completing a book that explored distinctions between ableism and disablism (Bolt 2014a), which I pondered with the theme of the panel in mind and came up with the idea of the tripartite model of disability.

Cultural disability studies is an explicitly interdisciplinary field that synthesises scholarship in disability and various forms of cultural production. In order to probe that interdisciplinarity this chapter considers two interrelated questions. First, does the study of culture deepen our understanding of disability? Second, does the study of disability enrich our understanding of culture? To this end the avoidance of social encounters between disabled people and nondisabled people is analysed and theorised with reference to the influence of cultural representation. This discussion helps to explain how cultural disability studies can reduce the social impact of stereotypes (Hoffmann and Flamich 2016), and why disability studies increasingly pertains to cultural factors. But also illustrated is the fact that a critical appreciation of disability can greatly inform the study of cultural representations, be they literary, filmic, artistic, musical or whatever. The two interrelated questions raise a challenging issue, for although the field of cultural disability studies is undoubtedly growing, too often it continues to be ignored within the humanities. In effect, the avoidance of social encounters is duplicated in academia on a curricular level, a state of affairs thus termed critical avoidance.

This article reports the findings of research about the RNIB’s recent advertising campaign. Under the methodological rubric of Critical Discourse Analysis, two paradigms were applied as research instruments: an advertising aesthetic was used in the primary analysis; and the tripartite model of disability was used in the secondary analysis. This analysis of various texts culminated in the conclusion that the RNIB’s campaign is fundamentally contradictory, in danger of contributing to problematic social attitudes and thus hindering the very people it sets out to help – an issue greatly complicated by the organisational involvement of people registered as blind and partially sighted.

This interdisciplinary article presents research about the place of disability in the British sitcom Peep Show, whose 54 episodes span more than a decade in their transmission (2003–2015). The methodology of critical discourse analysis is employed to probe the relationship between casual word choice and broader themes such as normalcy, humour, and social attitudes. This analysis is informed by classic and new work in cultural disability studies, as well as by work in literary studies and television studies. The conclusion is that, despite its apparent irrelevance to disability studies, Peep Show reveals much about conversational invocations of disability.

This interdisciplinary article draws on the social sciences to posit a tripartite model from which literary research into disability can benefit. Ableism and disablism are defined by normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms respectively, but consideration is also given to non-normative positivisms. Informed by experiential knowledge, the model is illustrated with reference to a trilogy of literary representations of blindness: George Sava’s novel Happiness is Blind, Brian Friel’s play Molly Sweeney, and Stephen Kuusisto’s memoir Eavesdropping. The result is a complex reading that recognises problems but also non-normative renderings of happiness.

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else’s domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies. This innovative book brings together work in the humanities and the social sciences, and draws on the riches of cultural diversity to challenge institutional and disciplinary avoidance. Divided into three parts, the first looks at how educational institutions and systems implicitly uphold double standards, which can result in negative experiences for staff and students who are disabled. The second part explores how disability studies informs and improves a number of academic disciplines, from social work to performance arts. The final part shows how more diverse cultural engagement offers a way forward for the academy, demonstrating ways in which we can make more explicit the interdisciplinary significance of disability studies – and, by extension, disability theory, activism, experience, and culture. Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance will interest students and scholars of disability studies, education studies and cultural studies.

This article considers critical responses to disability in 20th-century Anglo-American advertisements from which a problematic advertising aesthetic emerges. The aesthetic is used to test the progressiveness of a recent trilogy of Dove advertisements that represents visual impairment. The conclusion is that while there has been much progress, the ableist advertising aesthetic of decades ago remains an issue in the 21st century. More specifically, the Dove advertisements are found to be underpinned by ocularcentrism, despite their apparent appreciation of visual impairment.