Ten years after the publication of the first edition of the groundbreaking Exploring Disability, the second edition has just been released. Here Colin Barnes (Professor of Disability Studies at the Universities of Leeds and Halmstad, Sweden) surveys the advances and continuing challenges facing the field over the last decade…… Read More
Month: March 2010
Are the Empire’s Strikes Back?
In 1973, The Strawbs – an old-fashioned pop combo, a bit like today’s boybands but they played their own instruments and wrote their own songs (I know, it’s ridiculous) – released their now classic song, Part of the Union, which contained the following lyric: “So though I’m a working … Read More
Death and Dying in America by Andrea Fontana and Jennifer Reid Keene
As we write this blog we are coping with the aftermath of the tragedy in Haiti. The latest count is an estimated 230,000 deaths and rising. Haiti happened too late to be included in our book but it reflects its scope–trying to understand and explain who dies, how we die, … Read More
Explaining the Normative
The biggest buzzword in contemporary philosophy is normativity. Volume after volume has been churned out defending the idea that normativity is real, indispensable, even the single metaphysical basis for everything, including nature. The past of philosophy, especially Kant and German idealism, has been reinterpreted as being about normativity. Wittgenstein has … Read More
A New Dawn for Social Policy after the Economic Crash?
For Bill Jordan (University of Plymouth), a leading scholar of social policy, the findings of the recent inquiry into standards at Stafford Hospital – described as ‘one of the worst NHS scandals in history’ – offer confirmation of what’s wrong with social policy and its current principles…
My … Read More
