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Disability worlds By FayeGinsburg and RaynaRapp, Durham: Duke University Press. 2024. 288 pp.

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Disability Worlds explicates how disability shapes the world.It outlines how disability histories are interwoven with disabled peoples' ideas of the future, showing readers a selection of the many ways that an attunement to place shapes our attention to the possibilities of and for disability worlds.In attending to the book's central contributions, this review moves back and forth between chapters, a kind of movement that mirrors the ways that Ginsburg and Rapp move between the abundance of disability worlds.A title as far-reaching as that of this book brings every kind of reader to ask: what (kinds of) worlds do people with disabilities inhabit?Across the sites that each of the six chapters attend to, the book not only moves through disability worlds that have expanded over the last three decades, but also the worlds, lineages, and experiences that have shaped what we encounter in each chapter and, looking ahead, the ways that the worlds outlined in the book will continue to shape other disability worlds that are emerging.Throughout the book, Ginsburg and Rapp remind us of the vast diversity inherent in disabled peoples' experiences, with each chapter offering readers a particular ethnographic slice of disabled peoples' everyday experiences in the city.The book moves from genetic testing clinics and pediatric neuroscience labs to homes, schools, the transition to higher education, workplaces, the world of disability arts, and, finally, the varied futures of disabled people.Ginsburg and Rapp each come to disability worlds through different but intertwined personal journeys with their respective children, Sam and Teo, and they highlight how their experiences as parents of disabled children brought them into community, opening up, as it were, a world each time that they hadn't known before.As we move through the book, we learn not only about Sam and Teo's lives over the course of three decades, but also about the plethora of disabled worlds that other young people in the city and their families inhabit.Ginsburg and Rapp's reflexive attention to their own relationships to disability as personal experience and as a research topic shapes both theory and method throughout the book, doing so in ways where we see some of the best attempts to make the familiar strange through an interrogation of how we might think of the boundaries of disability and normalcy.Despite the vast amount of time that they have spent studying the topic, Rapp and Ginsburg are careful to make explicit their own journeys to and through disability worlds while highlighting valuable perspectives from disabled people and others who constitute these worlds.Therefore, although the book engages extensively with a range of critical scholarship on disability, it is accessible to both readers who are new to encounters with disability as well as those that are familiar with the topic, particularly making it a suitable text for both graduate
DOI: 10.1111/maq.70037
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416138579
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