Accessible school transportation is often essential to disabled students’ equitable access to education. This study centres on the experiences of education professionals with disabled students’ school transportation in Ontario, Canada’s Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Grounded in a Critical Disability Studies perspective, the paper is organized around three key themes: operational barriers, communication complexities, and inclusive practices. Student transportation problems can give rise to serious safety concerns and excessive missed classroom time, and impose severe limitations on extracurricular participation. These issues, often overlooked in policy and practice, are exacerbated by bus driver shortages and the prioritization of cost-minimization over disabled students’ experiences and well-being. Communication gaps between school boards, schools, families, and student transportation providers undermine both reliability and student safety. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving accessible student transportation. The study illuminates the need for cross-sector collaboration, including meaningful engagement with families, to address transportation inequities. • Disabled students face barriers to safe and inclusive school transportation. • Issues with scheduling, route planning, and communication must be addressed. • Education professionals play a key role in shaping accessible school transportation. • Recommendations for policy and practice are proposed for consideration.

This qualitative study aims to (1) identify the barriers and facilitators to disabled motherhood projects in Spain, and (2) illustrate the forms of access work undertaken in accessing disabled motherhood. The theoretical framework is the social-relational model of disability and disability reproductive justice. This qualitative study is based on a content analysis of 13 interviews with Spanish disabled women. The results highlight the importance of including not only physical, communicative, and attitudinal barriers, but also facilitators to motherhood, and to understand them through the social-relational model of disability. In conclusion, healthcare institutions should incorporate critical disability studies perspectives that help them reflect on psycho-emotional disablism and access work.

ABSTRACT Grounded in Critical Disability Studies, this study examines how mechanisms of oppression are recurrently legitimized in relation to Disabled students in Physical Education (PE). Drawing on bell hooks’ perspective, this study explores recurring logics of domination, thereby deepening understandings of how oppression is produced and sustained in PE. Using a post-structuralist approach, we conducted qualitative interviews with nine PE teachers to examine the dominant beliefs and pedagogical practices that shape PE in relation to disability. Interview data were analyzed through interpretative discourse analysis, guided by Critical Disability Studies and informed by hooks’ critical insights on oppression. The findings suggest that teachers’ discourses reinforce a normative model of PE centered on the non-disabled body, reproducing power relations that privilege non-disabled bodies and marginalize others. Through bell hooks’ lens, we question how inclusion has addressed segregation without dismantling structural ableism. We argue that inclusion in PE has often served to assimilate Disabled students into oppressive systems rather than transform them. This study invites critical reflection on whether inclusion has truly disrupted ableist norms in PE or merely soothed institutional conscience while continuing to silence Disabled voices.

The representation of students with disabilities (SWD) in physical therapist education programs is lower than in other health care education programs. Technical standards (TS), the non-academic requirements for admission to health care education programs, may impact access to education for SWD. However, the availability and language of TS has not been comprehensively assessed. The objective of this study was to describe the availability and language of TS in physical therapist education programs. This study was conducted as a mixed methods online exploratory study. Phase 1 collected TS and described the availability and ease of locating TS. Phase 2 analyzed TS compliance and inclusivity using a Critical Disability Studies framework. The study setting was online, with physical therapist education program websites reviewed as a part of the data collection. Websites from United States Commission on Accreditation of Physical Therapy accredited physical therapist education programs as of March 2023 (n = 260) were included in the study. Phase 1: Analyzed TS for availability and ease of locating. Phase 2: Analyzed available TS for willingness to provide accommodations, nature of compliance with legal obligations and locus of responsibility for providing accommodations. Phase 1: 75% of programs had TS available and 77.9% of TS were easy to locate. Phase 2: 45% of TS were equivocal in willingness to accommodate. Most TS were compliant (83%). No programs identified the student as responsible for providing accommodations and 13 (7.6%) described a shared process between the school and the student. Findings show some movement towards disability inclusion and offer areas to address TS. More research is needed to understand the impact of TS on SWD applying to physical therapist education programs. Including SWD in physical therapist education programs may transform the workforce to meet the need for more physical therapists as well as potentially mitigate health disparities.

As the population continues to age, and gaming continues to grow as a hobby for older people, heterogeneity among older adult gamers is increasing. We argue that traditional game-based accessibility features, like simplified input schemes, redundant information channels, and increased legibility of digital user interfaces, are limited in the face of this heterogeneity. This is because such features affect all older adult players and, therefore, are designed generically. We introduce artificial intelligence-although it has its own limitations and ethical concerns-as a method of creating player-based accessibility features, given the adaptive nature of the technology. These features may help to address a unique assemblage of accessibility needs that may accumulate through age. We argue that existing AI technologies can build upon extant accessibility design techniques to improve digital game accessibility for heterogeneous older adults. We adopt insights from gerontology, human-computer interaction, and disability studies into the digital game design discourse for older adults, and we contribute insight that guides the integration of player-based accessibility features to supplement game-based counterparts. The accessibility of digital games for heterogeneous older adults is paramount, as the medium offers short-term social, emotional, psychological, cognitive, and physical benefits that support the long-term goal of aging well.

ABSTRACT Despite the well-established benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms, many teachers maintain indifferent or deficit-oriented perspectives on inclusion. Courses aligned with Disability Studies in Education (DSE) may be able to help teacher candidates develop more inclusive dispositions and improved self-efficacy for teaching students with disabilities. This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning inquiry explored the impacts of aligning an introductory special education course with DSE tenets. General education teacher candidates reported their beliefs about disabilities, attitudes toward inclusion, and self-efficacy at the beginning and end of the course. Results indicated that candidates endorsed more inclusive dispositions and felt more prepared for teaching students with disabilities after completing the DSE-aligned course. Changes were similar regardless of licensure area or course modality. These findings have implications for teacher educators seeking to empower future teachers to provide equitable support for all students.

ABSTRACT This article reads Nitin Bose’s Deedar (1951) and Satyen Bose’s Dosti (1964) to show how Hindi melodrama articulates an affective economy of pity, charity, and para-familial care in early post-Independence India. Using affect theory and disability studies, it argues that these films, working within broader social concerns, transform physical impairment into public feeling: melodramatic omission of accidents, sacrificial gestures, and pathos-laden songs mediate audience sympathy while converting charity into both a survival strategy and a mechanism of hierarchical structuring. Pity operates relationally—structuring fulfilment for benefactors, obligating gratitude from beneficiaries, and producing quasi-kinship networks that substitute for limited institutional support. Far from a single, reducible stereotype, cinematic pity produces contradictory outcomes: it sustains material care under conditions of state neglect even as it reproduces hierarchical dependency. The paper calls for reading popular cinema as an archive of affective practices through which postcolonial India negotiated the imaginations of disability and care.

Limited research has examined self-reported disability and disability-related experiences among residents. A better understanding of the experiences of trainees with disabilities is needed to inform support systems within graduate medical education (GME). This exploratory study aims to describe self-reported disability among residents at an academic medical center, accommodations and supports, and disability-related mistreatment. This single-site study was approved by the Beth Israel Deaconess Institutional Review Board and conducted between 2024 and 2025. An online survey was administered to all residents at the academic medical center. Survey results were analyzed descriptively. The survey response rate was 16% (n = 91/558). 12 respondents (13%) reported a disability, most commonly neurodevelopmental/learning disabilities (58%) and chronic health conditions (42%). Of those, four respondents (33%) reported having disability accommodations. Four respondents (33%) experienced disability-related mistreatment; of those, two indicated that they reported the mistreatment to the appropriate channels. Nearly all respondents with disabilities (92%) were unaware of disability-specific GME resources. Most respondents felt that their program leadership and co-residents were accepting and supportive of disability. In this exploratory study of residents from a single academic medical center, 13% self-reported having a disability. One-third experienced disability-related mistreatment. Findings from this study support site-specific efforts to streamline the disability accommodations process, ensure confidential mistreatment reporting, and improve awareness of disability-specific resources.

The lack of coordination between technology, law and society can create various discriminatory situations for people with disabilities. Speech-impaired people who are unable to write and use assistive technology encounter these situations within the sphere of inheritance law. Even though people use this technology to express themselves in daily life, current frameworks don’t always allow for legal transactions to be completed (or considered valid) via technology. This article addresses this issue through a legal investigation of inheritance law in Italy and compares it with legal systems in other countries. The analysis interrogates both the laws and the theoretical, social and organizational factors that create contradictions regarding technology use and legitimacy. These contradictions reinforce exclusion of people with disabilities from social and juridical institutions. Referring to Posthuman Disability Studies, the article proposes ways of rethinking inheritance law, including recognizing wills created via assistive technology as being legitimate.

An unusual Greek helmet at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has confused scholars for decades. The helmet looks very much like a Corinthian helmet, the most popular helmet type in Archaic Greece, except for the fact that it was constructed in two halves. A seam runs vertically from the tip of the nose to the back of the neck guard, and the helmet is held together by a series of rivets. This paper presents an archaeometallurgical study of this object and explores how it challenges our paradigmatic approach to the material culture of ancient Greek warriorhood by engaging with important concepts from disability studies. The results indicate that construction of the Hearst helmet required less time and technical know-how, but more labor and fuel, than the more common one-piece Corinthian helmet type. Envisioning and mapping this process provides a window into the thought processes and preferences of the metalsmiths, their clients, and the combatants who wore these helmets into battle. In this case, the Hearst helmet was probably used in combat at least twice before a blow, preserved on the upper right side of the helmet, likely incapacitated the hoplite. Through the lens of disability theory, this paper explores how the Hearst helmet both adheres to and transgresses our taxonomic expectations. The helmet is indeed different, but it is far from unusual. Ancient armor had less to do with utility and defensive capabilities than we might think, but it is still a vital window into the ways in which warriors crafted their identities through the objects they bore.

A longitudinal study of depression, anxiety, and disability in multiple sclerosis: Profile and trajectories analyses.

Interrogating the ethics of visual methods: A critical disability studies critique of photovoice

Institutional discourse shapes how care, autonomy and participation are governed within the French medico-social field for autistic people and individuals with intellectual disabilities. Although the Quality of Life (QoL) paradigm is prominent in policy documents, little is known about how its dimensions appear in the everyday language of service organisations. This study examines how institutional communication frames inclusion and support, and how these discursive patterns align with or diverge from multidimensional QoL models. We analysed a national corpus of 4,813 publicly available service charters (projets de service) from French medico-social organisations. A mixed-methods design was used: (1) computational topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify latent thematic structures; and (2) qualitative interpretive analysis to examine how autonomy, rights, participation and support are semantically framed. Interpretation followed the multidimensional QoL framework, focusing on material, bodily, relational and psychological domains. The topic model revealed a coherent discursive configuration centred on project-based care, developmental rationalities and symbolic commitments to inclusion. Across the corpus, psychological, relational and developmental dimensions of well-being dominated, while physical, material and socio-economic aspects were consistently marginalised or rendered implicit. This imbalance indicates a partial translation of the QoL model, privileging relational and developmental ideals over embodied and material conditions of daily life. Institutional language reproduces a selective interpretation of QoL, emphasising relational and psychological components while underrepresenting bodily, material and socio-economic domains essential to everyday well-being. Drawing on institutional psychotherapy and disability studies, we propose the notion of practice-with-many (pratique-à-plusieurs) as a collective, reflective counter-model capable of reintroducing embodiment, dependence and shared vulnerability into the governance of care. QoL emerges as a situated, relational and institutional construct shaped by everyday service practices rather than solely by policy frameworks.

This article examines the paradox of religious inclusion and silent exclusion experienced by deaf congregants in a South African township Catholic church. Drawing on a qualitative case study involving a hearing priest, a South African Sign Language (SASL) interpreter, and three deaf parishioners, the study analyzes how access to worship is mediated, uneven, and structurally fragile. Whereas the provision of sign language interpretation signals institutional recognition, inconsistent availability, linguistic variation, and the auditory orientation of Catholic liturgy constrain full participation. Deaf congregants employ adaptive strategies—including situational awareness, visual cueing, and mobile technologies—that demonstrate agency but impose unequal cognitive and spiritual labor compared to hearing congregants. Integrating insights from Deaf studies, disability studies, and disability theology, the article argues that genuine religious inclusion requires more than interpretation; it demands the reconfiguration of liturgy in SASL and the promotion of deaf leadership within ecclesial life. The findings highlight the need for institutional transformation beyond accommodation to realize full spiritual belonging.

Theme: Norms of (Dis)ability in Nordic Children’s and Young Adult Literature. This article presents a comparative analysis of Finland-Swedish Tove Jansson’s short story “Det osynliga barnet” (“The Invisible Child,” 1962) and Norwegian Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus’ picturebook Snill (Kind, 2002), both of which portray metaphorical depictions of girls who deviate from social norms. The article shows how the protagonists, Ninny and Lussi, fall into silence as a response to emotional trauma and marginalization, before eventually reclaiming their voices. Drawing on critical disability studies, this study examines how the girls’ silences and reappearances function narratively and aesthetically. The analysis focuses on how their incapacities are depicted and how these depictions intersect with notions of power, gender, and normality. By investigating the ways in which silence operates as both a narrative problem and a metaphor for trauma and invisibility, the article explores how the stories structure and resolve this problem through the girls’ eventual “recovery.” The study argues that while their regaining of voice may seem emancipatory, it can also be read as a form of adaptation to updated yet still coercive norms of girlhood. The comparative approach also enables a reflection on how discourses surrounding discipline, conformity, and resistance have shifted over time. Ultimately, the article highlights the interplay between silence, speech, and normality, and the extent to which these stories both reproduce and challenge dominant tropes.

Purpose This study investigates the cultural, structural, and religious barriers shaping guide dog use in Türkiye, a Muslim-majority society where institutional support and public awareness remain limited. As one of the first empirical studies examining guide dog partnerships in a Muslim-majority context, it addresses a gap in the global literature on disability, mobility, and assistive technologies. Methods Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five legally blind guide dog users in Türkiye, the study employs qualitative phenomenological analysis informed by critical disability studies, affect theory, and cultural sociology. The analysis examines how guide dog partnerships are experienced within a sociocultural environment shaped by religious interpretations, urban infrastructure, and public attitudes towards disability. Results Findings show that guide dog partnerships are shaped not only by accessibility barriers but also by relational labour, religious perceptions, social stigma, and encounters with stray dogs in public spaces. Participants described guide dogs as emotional and social companions that supported independence, confidence, and public engagement. At the same time, handlers navigated misunderstandings about religious permissibility, limited institutional accommodations, and risks posed by urban stray dog populations. Conclusions Guide dogs function not only as mobility aids but also as catalysts for increased visibility and social inclusion of visually impaired individuals. The findings highlight the need for culturally informed disability policy and public education while offering guidance for improving accessibility and institutional support for guide dog partnerships in Muslim-majority contexts.

ABSTRACT This article examines holographic Holocaust survivor testimony through the interactive biography of Renée Firestone at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. As living witnesses diminish, museums adopt the Dimensions in Testimony project, raising questions about authenticity and engagement. Reflecting on encounter with Firestone’s hologram, I argue that visitors’ treatment of Firestone as a ‘real’ person obscures dynamics of objectification and spectatorship. Drawing on disability studies, the article shows how holographic displays risk turning survivors into spectacle and reinscribing the Jewish body as a ‘Other’. Centering a disability perspective, I interrogate how these technologies shape knowledge, empathy, and display ethics.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates that disability microhistory provides a powerful methodological framework by integrating microhistory with critical disability studies. Using Icelandic public records from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, this study shows how seemingly fragmentary institutional sources can reconstruct the nuanced lived experiences of disabled individuals. By integrating microhistorical close reading with the ethical and analytical tools of critical disability studies, this approach allows historians to recover agency, care networks, and everyday participation. The main argument is that such a framework challenges exclusionary narratives and highlights complexity, resilience, and social embeddedness. Disability microhistory thus sets out an empirically grounded, innovative model for future research on disability in history.

ABSTRACT In higher education institutions, as the number of online language courses continues to grow, it is essential to equip faculty with the support and tools necessary to enhance learning experiences for students with visual impairments. Grounded in Culturally Relevant Disability Pedagogy and Disability Studies Theory, this study advocates for more equitable and accessible course design for underrepresented learners. Using a qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, the study examines online language faculty’s lived experiences teaching students with visual impairments. A purposive sample of 10 language faculty members across the United States participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted via videoconferencing. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed iteratively through close reading, initial coding, and the development of emergent and superordinate themes. The study was guided by the following research questions: 1) What are faculty experiences in delivering online language courses to students with visual impairments? 2) How do faculty describe the support and training they receive in delivering accessible online language courses? 3) What are the strategies and tools faculty use when teaching languages to students with visual impairments online? Findings indicate that Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance in online language instruction requires greater prioritization. Participants described limited institutional support and insufficient training in accessible course design, often relying on self-directed learning and reactive adaptations. These findings underscore the need for more systematic and proactive approaches to accessibility in online language education to ensure that visually impaired learners can fully engage and succeed academically.

The past 30 years have seen significant changes in how Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is understood, with public discourse and prevalence rates reaching an all-time high. While its evolution in the U.S. is well documented, recent global and digital shifts prompt a reexamination of ADHD research. The significance of this article is that it maps and analyzes, for the first time, an extensive and heterogeneous body of scholarship, spanning the sociology and anthropology of health and mental health; science, technology, media, and disability studies; and medical humanities, to propose the definition of a new subfield of "social studies of ADHD." By synthesizing key conceptual developments, social theories, and empirical findings therein, our article fills in a substantive gap in the literature, identifies main analytical frameworks, and outlines future research directions. We first trace the history of ADHD diagnosis and the DSM, rendered as an exemplary case of medicalization-as both theory and process-in the sociological literature since the mid-1970s. Second, we examine debates on the globalization of ADHD diagnosis and treatment to illuminate new areas of study and cross-national comparison. Third, we discuss alternative models and emergent perspectives on demedicalization, decolonial approaches, and the neurodiversity paradigm, which operates both as a social scientific concept and a movement. We then synthesize the latest research on the digital health turn to consider how emergent technologies and online platforms are reconfiguring ADHD knowledge, subjectivity, and sociality. To conclude, we use our critical analysis as a launchpad for setting a future interdisciplinary agenda for ADHD research in three areas that are relevant to the social study of health, illness, and medicine more widely: (1) digital and more-than-human perspectives on attention and care; (2) ethnography and phenomenology of ADHD affect and embodiment; and (3) intersectional, decolonial, and community research approaches.