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This volume revolutionarily reconceptualizes disability not as a static but a dynamic phenomenon which is related to social, cultural, psychological and historical context. Papers by leading disability scholars in the areas of sociology, anthropology, and history look at the fluidity of disability and rethink how we are measuring disability

Disability is often described in a way that suggests that it is most often a permanent state. Many concepts and models of disability suggest this. Even when it is described as being socially constructed, the implication is that an impairment leads to a permanent status of disabled within that social, cultural or historical milieu. But there is a lot of evidence that disability is a fluid state. The relationship between impairment (physical state) and disability is neither fixed nor permanent but is fluid and not easily predicted. This volume revolutionarily reconceptualizes disability not as a static but a dynamic phenomenon which is related to social, cultural, psychological and historical context. Papers by leading disability scholars in the areas of sociology, anthropology and history examine this premise from many points of view. Several look at micro-level interactional processes over time, some look at cultural change over time and their effects on definitions and measurements, and some look at how social processes shape physical conditions into disabilities or impairments/disabilities into normality. All examine the fluidity of disability and rethink how we measure it.

Protests from different social movements sometimes coincide, but does that mean that one movement is influencing the other and increasing its "action mobilization," or are different sets of factors causing the coincident protests? This paper examines that question in reference to two sets of coincident protests: those of people with disabilities and those of the pro-Democracy protests of 2011. It shows that, although disability protests did not start at the same time as the pro-Democracy protests, a number happened during and after, and in close physical proximity to, those protests. Neither set of protests acknowledged or referred to the other. While it is likely that a new law in Egypt and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities were among the mobilizing factors for people with disabilities, it also appears that the language of "rights" began to diffuse from the pro-Democracy protests to the disability protests.

This paper asks if disability protests in Canada diffused from similar protests in the US or if they sprang up independently. It analyzes 1215 American protests and 177 Canadian protests which occurred between 1970 and 2005. It shows that Canadian protests began later than protests in the US, are more likely than American protests to be impairment-specific, are more likely to have demands in which focus on services as opposed to rights and are more likely to target provincial governments. Explanations include the effect of several notable protest successes and the development of multiple-impairment, single-issue organizations in the American context, and the social structure of disability services at the local or provincial levels in the Canadian context. The paper concludes that Canadian protests did not occur because of American protests or diffuse from them.

"Current research in Sociology of Disability has a tendency to assume that very little written in this area until the last 20 years. However, this is not always the case. In part the lack of awareness of older writing occurs because of the ease of computerized searching for recent references or a sense that newer is better. It also reflects the assumption that Sociology as a field has ignored either disability as a social phenomenon or treated it solely as a medical phenomenon. While theorists and introductory textbooks have tended [and still tend] to ignore disability as a non-medical phenomenon and especially as a structured source of inequality, that does not mean that no attention was paid to disability in the earlier years. Rather, interest in disability from a sociological point of view exists as early as the late 1800s. The purpose of this volume is to explore that literature, with an eye towards encouraging current scholars not to ask 'the same old' questions but to use the older writings as a basis for revolutionary as well as evolutionary thinking. What do the older writings tell us about what questions we should be asking, and what research we should be doing, today?"--Provided by publisher.

Physical structure, economic expectation or social relationship norms developed within various cultures can either restrict or support the participation of individuals with disabilities in society. The influence of environmental factors can vary significantly according to context, characteristics or by action difficulty. The objective of this volume is to identify and address environmental issues that support or restrict the participation of persons with functional limitations in society, either at the micro, meso or macro levels. The papers address both individual, societal, national and international levels of environment and shed new light on the processes involved with creating or modifying these environmental supports or barriers. Several papers approach the societal and intra-societal levels. The volume is separated into four parts; part one focuses on the larger disability environment from an international, national and community perspective, the second includes important theoretical and methodological approaches; section three highlights reviews of the environmental literature and the final section addresses personal experience with environmental barriers.

Disability can be either an ascribed status or an achieved status and its combination with other statuses will affect the person's social experiences. This issue challenges critical thinking about the interrelationships with disability. It questions if the concepts and methods of intersectionality can be applied to disability at all