A new book exploring the incarceration of those with disabilities, co-edited by York social work Professor Chris Chapman, will launch Friday.
Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (Palgrave Macmillan) will launch Nov. 21, from 6 to 8pm, at OISE Library, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto.
The launch will feature talks by the book’s co-editors Professor Liat Ben-Moshe of the University of Toledo’s Disability Studies program, sociology Professor Allison C. Carey of Shippensburg University and Chapman, a professor in York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. Several other local contributors to the book will also discuss their work: Jiji Voronka, Shaista Patel, Syrus Marcus Ware and Erick Fabris.
Disability Incarcerated is a collection of interdisciplinary papers examining the incarceration and segregation of disabled people in North America, as well as how disability is relevant to the confinement and control of various bodies and identities (see YFile article July 28).
The book has several York contributors, including critical disability studies Professor Geoffrey Reaume who wrote the chapter “Eugen
ics Incarceration and Expulsion: Daniel G. and Andrew T.’s Deportation from 1928 Toronto, Canada.” Ware, who will begin his PhD in environmental studies at York in September, co-authored “It Can’t be Fixed Because It’s Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison Industrial Complex” with Joan Ruzsa and Giselle Dias. York alumna Katie Aubrecht (MA ’07) co-wrote “Chemical Constraint: Experiences of Psychiatric Coercion, Restraint, and Detention as Carceratory Techniques” with Fabris.
Chapman’s research revolves around the histories, rationales and practices of the “helping professions” by mobilizing perspectives of those who have been subjected to them, drawing on disability studies, critical race theory, anti-colonial studies, prison abolitionist, anti-capitalist, queer and feminist critiques of social services.