Autocritical Disability Studies
About the Book Series
This new book series represents both a contribution to, and a departure from, the academic field of critical disability studies. According to some concerns about that field, disability is the start but never the finish, there is insufficient engagement with the ethical and political issues faced by disabled people, and the work is too insensitive to individual experiences. Such concerns are addressed boldly in the new series via a formal coupling of critical disability studies with the research method of autoethnography.
The qualitative method of autoethnography acknowledges a researcher’s individual experience in the most explicit of ways, from the very start of the process to the finished product that reaches publication. Whereas most traditional research methods claim, or at least aspire to, objectivity, autoethnography owns its subjectivity as paramount. This being so, when academic authors/editors have direct or at least intimate individual experience of disability, the subjectivity of their books can predicate a shift in typology from critical disability studies to what the new series terms autocritical disability studies.
In encouraging textual and theoretical work, the series also introduces autocritical discourse analysis and autocritical disability theory to formalise the ethical and epistemological importance of disability experience in many aspects of critical studies. The key point about the books sought for the series, then, is precisely that the individual experience of disability is recognised and positioned as both start and finish.
The book series editor, Professor David Bolt, encourages expressions of interest from potential monograph authors and volume editors.
Cultural Stations of Disability: A Moment in Discourse
1st Edition
Edited
By David Bolt
November 25, 2025
In the disability community, which can have multiple meanings in itself, we often experience poignant moments in sociocultural discourse. Our pathways to knowledge and understanding of identity are defined by life’s landmarks, many of which resonate with what thereby become formative figures or ...
The Playground Model of Disability: Dis/honesty Tropes in Contemporary British Sociocultural Representation
1st Edition
By David Bolt
October 20, 2025
More than being counter to what we must surely endeavour to consider the status quo of honesty, not to mention the pursuit of truth that should still be fundamental in academia and education more broadly, dishonesty involves deceit and thus victimisation, which is to say it tends to be used either ...
Learning with Learning Disability: What Learning Disability Can Teach Us About Being Human
1st Edition
By Owen Barden
July 09, 2025
This book uses the concept of “learning disability” to explore what it means to be human. It argues that we need to learn with rather than from or about learning disability. This crucial distinction means being open to what learning disability can teach us about what it means to be human. This ...
Stories on Disability Through our Voices: Born This Way
1st Edition
By Yoon Joo Lee
March 26, 2025
This book integrates the discipline of disability studies with the lived experiences of women with visible disabilities. It seeks to foreground the silenced voices of Korean and Korean American women with visible physical disabilities in South Korea and the United States. Drawing upon the work of ...
Midgetism: The Exploitation and Discrimination of People with Dwarfism
1st Edition
By Erin Pritchard
October 09, 2024
There exist problematic attitudes and beliefs about dwarfism that have rarely been challenged, but continue to construct people with dwarfism as an inferior group within society. This book introduces the critical term ‘midgetism’, which the author has coined, to demonstrate that the socio-cultural ...
Advertising Disability
1st Edition
By Ella Houston
June 03, 2024
Advertising Disability invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental ...
Disability Duplicity and the Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X
1st Edition
By David Bolt
September 21, 2023
Disability is history and futurity, culture and society, practice and theory, work and play, an immense desire for life by which body and mind are dragged kicking and screaming into each and every new day. Using autocritical discourse analysis, a new hybrid research method that combines aspects of...
Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions
1st Edition
Edited
By David Bolt
December 30, 2022
This edited volume explores blindness as a construct with which we the contributors engage as part of our social existence and/or academic research. Irrespective of eye conditions, or the lack thereof, blindness is an understanding at which we have all come to arrive. On the way to this conceptual ...
Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order
1st Edition
Edited
By David Bolt
May 27, 2021
This book explores multiple metanarratives of disability to introduce and investigate the critical concept of assumed authority and the normative social order from which it derives. The book comprises 15 chapters developed across three parts and, informed by disability studies, is authored by those...