Keywords for Disability Studies

Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, eds. Keywords for Disability Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2015. 288pp.

In their introduction to Keywords for Disability Studies, Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin explain that their volume is intended to "provide a conceptual architecture that holds together the field's sometimes fractious components" (3). As a metaphor, "architecture" resonates powerfully with the core questions disability studies has taken up over the last several decades. Inaccessible buildings function as sites of exclusion, normalizing space in ways that limit who can and cannot participate in public, economic, and intimate life. Stubbornly material while also undeniably "constructed," architecture thus represents a contact point between concept and practice, aesthetics and politics, philosophy and experience. Making these connections explicit in their opening anecdote about the design of a new building on the Gallaudet campus - an event that reinvigorated discussions of accessibility and what it means to imagine Deaf space - the editors of this collection present its "keywords" in a similar gesture toward inclusive design.

The volume presents a series of sixty-two very brief essays written by a diverse and recognizable set of scholars from within the field, each addressing a different...