The best new disability studies books for fighting ableism and building a better future

This recently-released memoir is by Alice Wong, who directs the important Disability Visibility Project, which you should also check out! This book blends a variety of approaches and media to create a series of snapshots and provocations from Alice Wong’s life, mainly narrated through the relationships of care and community she has built. Through this memoir, you’ll get a history of disability activism over the past two decades, but you will also meet an incredibly funny, creative, and dedicated activist.

Black Disability Politics also just came out in early Fall 2022, and I was very excited to receive my print copy. The book shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue tightly tied to race and racism. This, however, has not been the story told in disability studies or in mainstream histories of the Disability Rights movement. Schalk deeply explores archives (for instance those of the Black Panther Party) and layers these findings across interviews with contemporary Black disabled community organizers, to recognize the richness and power of Black disability politics. This book is full of surprises, memorable archival anecdotes, and powerful conversations between Schalk and others. You should read this book! If a goal within ableist and white supremacist society is liberation, Schalk shows how essential it is to engage in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist political and cultural coalition.

I was lucky to get the opportunity to read an advance copy of Dr. Kerschbaum's latest monograph, Signs of Disability (in the press and available in both print and open access in Fall 2022). The book focuses on the signs of disability we can recognize everywhere around us: yellow diamond-shaped “deaf person in area” road signs, that wheelchair parking icon, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived as anything but a token or an apparition. This engaging, accessible book builds on Kerschbaum’s already-award-winning scholarship on difference and discourse, constructing new research methods and approaches, but also building community on these pages. Drawing on a set of thirty-three research interviews, as well as written narratives by disabled people, this book builds a new system of signs and significance for disability. Signs of Disability offers an incredibly generative vocabulary for understanding the ways that disability matters: how we mark and signal it, how we ignore and hide it, how we powerfully inhabit and embody it through stories. Signs of Disability is a transformative book, and you should read it!

Though it came out in the Summer of 2022, and had a headstart on the other books on my list, Just Care is in conversation with the rest of this list, and is just as relevant to our current moment, when we might agree that we have a crisis of care. Nishida shows that care dynamics exist within a brutal social order that determines who survives and who deteriorates. Along with the other books on this list, the research methods are creatively mixed here, with interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities. Just Care documents how people with disabilities work together to reimagine care. We are all enmeshed in a healthcare industry with giant cracks and fissures exposed by the pandemic, and in which we will all move between caregiving, receiving, or both. Read Just Care to better understand imbalances in care, as well as to begin forming alternatives. 

We are incredibly lucky to have so much important work in disability studies and disability justice coming out in the Fall of 2022. The Future Is Disabled is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s much-anticipated follow-up to Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Written during lockdown, this is an urgent and beautiful book, shifting from love letters to songs, recipes for survival, and provocative questions. For instance and central to this work, the book asks: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? The truth is that disabled people have had to weather an unprecedented assault on their value and had to assume huge risks over the past few years, as Nishida also shows. As with Kerschbaum, Nishida, and Schalk’s books, Piepzna-Samarasinha converses with disabled people to carefully document the many ways they have kept and are keeping each other—and the rest of the world—alive. In the disabled future we will all share, Piepzna-Samarasinha’s latest book offers a guide for survival and a roadmap to community.