Disability and Rurality ─ Identity, Gender and Belonging

This is the first book to explore how far disability, as a social identity, challenges dominant understandings of rurality, identity and belonging within the rural literature, particularly in regards to the ways in which bodies are given meaning and value in relation to core ethical rural considerations associated with physical strength, productivity, and social reciprocity. A range of different perspectives to the issues of living rurally with a disability inform this work. It includes the lived experience of people with disabilities through the use of life history methodologies and goes beyond conventional notions of rurality through grounding its analysis in a range of disability spaces and places and including the work of disability sociologists, geographers, cultural theorists and policy analysis. This inter-disciplinary reveals the contradictory and competing relations of rurality for disabled people and, the resultant impacts and effects upon disabled people’s lives materially, discursively and symbolically. Of interest to all scholars of disability, rural studies, social work and welfare, this, the book provides a critical intervention into the growing scholarship of rurality that has by-passed the pivotal role of disability in understanding, locating and describing rural landscapes.

Dr Karen Soldatic is Director of Teaching at the Centre for Social Impact at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is an international researcher in the field of disability studies and her research work has been published in some of the world’s leading international social science journals including: Disability Studies Quarterly (2014), Disability & Society (2013), Scandinavian Journal of Disability Studies (2013), Critical Sociology (2013) and Social Policy & Society (2012). She has three forthcoming international edited volumes with Routledge (2014) and Springer (2015). Her rich research work builds upon her extensive policy experience working inside government on national disability policy priorities, undertaking major state programmatic reforms involving research, public consultation and program implementation (2002 - 2010). Professor Kelley Johnson is Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is a leading international researcher who has undertaken research with people with disabilities for more than fifteen years in Australia, Slovakia, Ireland, Iceland and the UK. She has recently taken up the position of Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW Australia Prior to this position she was Professor of Disability Policy and Practice at the University of Bristol in the UK where she was head of the Norah Fry Research Centre. She has published five books, two of which are edited volumes which focus on deinstitutionalization, community living, gender and inclusive research. Her latest co-authored book (with Jan Walmsley) titled People with Intellectual Disability: Towards a Good Life (2014 Bristol: Policy Press) presented an analysis of current policy about intellectual disability and suggested some new directions.