Grouped around four central themes – illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations – this collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways.

Disability Research Today starts by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multidisciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that affect disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and deafness.

Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. Disability Research Today is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.

"Editor Tom Shakespeare, renowned disability author and activist, introduces the volume as an explicit attempt to "[place] disability studies on a stronger empirical footing"… Disability Research Today is sure to spark strong interest among scholars hoping to pursue critical realism, while the interdisciplinarity and breadth of scholarship can be expected to appeal to variety of research interests and, even more importantly, to related disability struggles." - Natalie Spagnuolo (York University, Toronto), H-Net Reviews

Throughout the text, readers encounter a wide range of topics, from tojisha kenkyu in Japan to inclusive higher education in Italy. Though some contributions are stronger than others, the collection’s attention to international policy, experiences, and research leaves readers with a greater understanding of disability’s contextuality, complexity, and multidimensionality...Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.'- G. Schlesselman-Tarango, California State University San Bernardino, CHOICE, October 2015

Tom Shakespeare is Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at the Medical School of the University of East Anglia, UK. Previously he worked for the World Health Organization, where he was an author and editor of the World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011), and International Perspectives on Spinal Cord Injury (WHO, 2013). His books include The Sexual Politics of Disability (Cassell, 1996) and Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge 2006, 2013). He has been involved in the disability movement since 1986.