Starting in the early twentieth century, this chapter surveys the most significant essays about disability and essays written by writers with disabilities, including Helen Keller, Randolph Bourne, Paul K. Longmore, Leonard Kriegel, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Exploring the common themes and the rich variety of styles represented in these essays, the chapter synthesizes a wide array of firsthand experiences by people with blindness, polio, schizophrenia, deformities, multiple sclerosis, and other conditions. Some of these essays highlight the discrimination and exclusion faced by the authors – Longmore’s stories of the financial hardships he faced due to his disability are a particularly compelling example – while others craft a new poetics to describe the singularity and promise of a life lived with a disability. The chapter closes with contemporary essays that illustrate the extent to which the field of disability writing has greatly diversified in the twenty-first century, offering a more extensive record of human experience.

Olmstead v. L.C. was a 1999 Supreme Court case concerning disability discrimination in a state Medicaid program. The Supreme Court held that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits states from unnecessarily institutionalizing disabled people as a condition of receipt of publicly assisted medical care. The original opinion requires states to provide community-based treatment for persons with mental disabilities when the state’s treatment professionals determine that such placement is appropriate, the affected individuals do not oppose such treatment, and the state can reasonably accommodate the placement. Professor Becka Rich’s rewritten opinion rejects the defendants’ arguments that the costs of community care limit their obligations under the ADA. Rich indicates that the courts will hold states to task for taking full advantage of the flexibility and funding provided by Medicaid to support compliance with the ADA’s integration mandate. Professor Doron Dorfman’s commentary highlights how the plaintiffs’ claims to community-based care generate tension between financial constraints and the needs of people with disabilities and other chronic health conditions.

This chapter discusses efforts to transcend disagreements between carer and disability rights perspectives in relation to care and support. The tension between these perspectives rests on a dichotomous view of people with disabilities as being either dependent on others and in need of ‘care’ or independent holders of rights. Ethics of care theorists have challenged this dichotomy, arguing that interdependence – both giving and receiving care – must be reconceived as normal and universal human experiences and elements of citizenship. Some disability scholars have engaged with the ethics of care perspective, drawing especially on a human rights perspective on disability, to devise an approach that can recognize and meet care and support needs on the basis of shared dignity rather than shared vulnerability. This would require the introduction of care and support policies that recognize and extend support to people in all forms of care and support relationships, recognize diversity of need, impairment and preference and facilitate the exercise of the full suite of citizenship and human rights. While this approach is promising, some conceptual differences between the carer and disability rights perspectives remain unaddressed, including a persistent tendency to prioritize one side of the care or support relationship over the other.

This chapter discusses a second source of care and support policy tension – the tension between supporting the claims of carers and supporting those of people with disabilities. Organized carer movements in Australia, the UK and other liberal welfare states have argued successfully for policy support on the basis of the burden of providing intensive care to older persons and/or children and adults with disabilities. Disability studies scholars and activists have challenged this characterization of disability as an individual deficit and source of burden, arguing instead that disability is a consequence of a failure to accommodate difference and recognize the rights of people with disabilities. They have advocated instead for policies that enable people with disabilities to be independent and choose how they live. Each approach has some benefits for one constituency at the expense of others. Support for carers to ‘care’ can produce disempowering arrangements for people with disabilities, while independent living arrangements sought by people with disabilities may disempower support workers if they do not have appropriate pay and conditions. Calls for choice and independent living have also coincided with the neoliberal marketization of care and support, resulting in a narrowing of choice that is only available to some.

With a particular focus on increasing discourse regarding intersectionality/ interconnectedness between oppression of humans and mistreatment of animals, this chapter evaluates arguments asserted by scholars, such as Justin Marceau in Beyond Cages, who are critical of increasing prosecutions and sentencing for crimes harming animals. The chapter also addresses the manner in which attitudes toward humans’ moral distinctiveness may influence reactions to these sorts of anti-carceral arguments, and it explores how the animal protection movement’s attraction to stronger criminalization reveals challenges for basing animal legal personhood arguments on intelligent animals’ cognitive capacities.

This chapter elevates and explores factors that have played a role in the advancement of human rights. The term “psychosocial” is used to mean the reciprocal and iterative relationship between psychological processes and social movements. We illustrate how psychosocial gains can create sociocultural climates and sociopolitical changes conducive to the instantiation of human rights. We begin by identifying some of the psychosocial dynamics that were in play when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. Subsequently, we focus on psychosocial gains and the advancement of human rights in three case studies involving people with disabilities, women, and people who are most adversely affected by climate change. The centrality of psychosocial processes in the run-up to declarations of human rights is emphasized. While declarations are highly visible outcomes, our research suggests that declarations are often preceded by a diffuse pattern of smaller psychosocial and sociopolitical gains. Given the centrality of psychosocial processes, we discuss emerging roles for psychologists as emancipatory practitioners who accompany marginalized people and assist in cultivating “new power” relationships that establish and promote a digital presence for movements aimed at the advancement of human rights.

The book concludes that, while there might be many areas of common experience, the ways in which disabled identities and citizenship are constituted and imagined in China might equally be a world away from those envisaged and experienced elsewhere. Theories of disability provide extremely useful tools for decoding the evidence we find, yet they can only take us so far as the various comparative lenses inherent in them inevitably leave China wanting. Proposing a broader conceptualisation of citizenship – para-citizenship – that acknowledges both the structural rules and resources that shape social systems and the individuals (and groups) within them, as well as the agency that enables individuals (and groups) to identify and respond to, or draw on, these particular power relationships, offers an approach that can encapsulate the diversity of disabling structures and disabled experiences, as well as reflect their fluidity and dynamism. And, with a much firmer understanding of disability in China’s recent past, we can begin to see how new forms of para-citizenship might be re-imagined in future, particularly as China transforms from within and opens up further to outside influences.

In the United States, a patchwork of privacy and antidiscrimination laws protects the rights of people with disabilities: the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects disability-related patient data as it flows from one healthcare provider to another. If the information leaks out of the healthcare system, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Fair Housing Act (FHA) can contain it and mitigate its effects. This patchwork of laws often succeeds in preventing disability discrimination. However, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are rendering it ineffective.

The social model of disability was implemented in the United States partially through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and most notably through certain universal accommodations for physical disabilities. The social model has also been applied to mental health, but the ADA did not provide for universal accommodations in mental health. In this Chapter, the authors conduct a systematic review of PubMed and PsycARTICLES to identify evidence for potential universal accommodations in mental health and discuss the policy and ethical considerations of implementing universal accommodations in mental health.

Privacy and disability have an odd relationship. States, communities, and families, sometimes forcibly, have hidden people with disabilities from public view and engagement. In the shadow of a history of forced isolation and as a way of managing the stigma of disability, people with disabilities have, at times, rejected their public identity as disabled. While some people may explicitly deny disability identity for a host of legitimate reasons, more often, people with disabilities capable of “passing” choose to move in the world without disclosing their disability identity even when disclosure can lead to greater access to services, accommodations, or other benefits. At other times, people capable of passing who wish to disclose are discouraged and, at times, prevented from disclosing.

Being designated as disabled under the law comes with an array of legal rights. These rights range from negative rights against discrimination by the state and by private actors in employment and public accommodations to positive rights to accommodations, financial (welfare) benefits, and even healthcare. Other statuses also trigger these kinds of protections, but few produce the same panoply of benefits: for example, race discrimination similarly elicits antidiscrimination protections by the state, but rarely any positive rights. Unemployment can yield welfare benefits, but is rarely protected under antidiscrimination law.