Ashgate has just published Understanding Disability
Discrimination Law through Geography, a new book by Fayyaz Vellani, a
Senior Fellow in the Critical Writing Program.
Examining disability discrimination laws in the UK, USA and Australia, this book focuses on how universities interpret and respond to these laws, highlighting the role that geography can play in understanding law and legal contexts. The book situates these laws in the wider debates about civil rights, human rights, and identity politics and considers how we might organize societies to be inclusive. Linking the challenge of creating inclusive societies to the current debates being raised by the Occupy movements, Vellani notes that:
Alternative social visions to neoliberal market capitalism have been few and far between and difficult to implement... are there other ways for us – as humans – to relate to each other and to the public sphere in which we see each other as neither cogs in a capitalist machine, nor as passive recipients of state-funded largesse, but as something else altogether?
The book was formally launched in March 2014 at a book signing event at the Penn Bookstore.