Presenting thirteen essays, editors James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson unite the fields of disability studies and rhetoric to examine connections between disability, education, language, and cultural practices. Bringing together theoretical and analytical perspectives from rhetorical studies and disability studies, these essays extend both the field of rhetoric and the newer field of disability studies.

The contributors span a range of academic fields including English, education, history, and sociology. Several contributors are themselves disabled or have disabled family members. While some essays included in this volume analyze the ways that representations of disability construct identity and attitudes toward the disabled, other essays use disability as a critical modality to rethink economic theory, educational practices, and everyday interactions. Among the disabilities discussed within these contexts are various physical disabilities, mental illness, learning disabilities, deafness, blindness, and diseases such as multiple sclerosis and AIDS.

James C. Wilson is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and the author of Vietnam in Prose and Film, John Reed for the Masses, and The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship. 

Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson is a professor of English at Miami University and the author of Writing Against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce, and From Community to College: Reading and Writing Across Diverse Contexts.  

“This is a needed book, with a much-needed focus . . . to further the argument put forth in disability studies that ‘disability’ is a socially-constructed label and that the material circumstances of ‘disabled’ people’s lives are closely tied to ‘non-disabled’ society’s construction of those lives. It also argues for the agency of the disabled: for their right to speak for themselves.”—Patricia A. Dunn, author of Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies