Grouped around four central themes - illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and cultural representations – this exciting book presents new voices in disability research, demonstrating its breadth and depth and moving beyond traditional concerns in disability studies.

1. Introduction Part 1: Illness and Impairment 2. Social Experiences of Physical Rehabilitation: The Role of the Family 3. Learning from Tojisha Kenkyu: Mental Health 'Patients' Studying Their Difficulties with Their Peers 4. The Psycho-Social Impact of Impairment: The Case of Motor Neurone Disease Part 2: Disabling Processes 5. Beyond the ICF: Italian Network Strategies for Job Placement of Persons with Disabilities 6. Sites of Oppression: Dominant Ideologies and Women with Disabilities in India 7. How to Understand Violence Against Disabled People 8. 'The Invisibles': Conceptualising the Intersectional Relationships Between Dyslexia, Social Exclusion and Homelessness Part 3: Care and Control 9. Spaces of indifference: bureaucratic governance and disability rights in Iceland 10. Mental Capacity and the Control of Sexuality of People with Intellectual Disabilites in England and Wales 11. 'My Sister Won't Let Me': Issues of Control Over One's Own Life as Experienced by Older Women with Intellectual Disabilities Part 4: Communication and Representation 12. Social Representations and Inclusive Practices for Disabled Students in Italian Higher Education: A Mixed-method Analysis of Multiple Perspectives 13. The Problem of the Supercrip: Representation and Misrepresentation of Disability 14. User, Client or Consumer? Construction of Roles in Video Interpreting Services 15. Reading Other Minds: Ethical Considerations on the Representation of Intellectual Disability in Fiction

"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 ReviewsThroughout 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