Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace. By Ruth O’Brien. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 256p. $50.00 cloth, $19.00 paper

Extract

The field of disability studies is growing in size, sophistication, and sweep, with its own research association and a few interdisciplinary programs scattered around the country. As with its predecessors and to some extent models, black studies and womens’ studies, disability studies is partly concerned with taking the perspective of a previously marginalized subject seriously. But besides uncovering what has been ignored, researchers in disability studies, perhaps even more than their colleagues in ethnic and gender studies, must confront and recast what has been studied before: whole fields of research that have developed particular ways of seeing people with disabilities.