Keywords for Disability Studies eds. by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (review)

In their introduction to Keywords for Disability Studies, Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin explain that their volume is intended to "provide a conceptual architecture that holds together the field's sometimes fractious components" (3). As a metaphor, "architecture" resonates powerfully with the core questions disability studies has taken up over the last several decades. Inaccessible buildings function as sites of exclusion, normalizing space in ways that limit who can and cannot participate in public, economic, and intimate life. Stubbornly material while also undeniably "constructed," architecture thus represents a contact point between concept and practice, aesthetics and politics, philosophy and experience. Making these connections explicit in their opening anecdote about the design of a new building on the Gallaudet campus—an event that reinvigorated discussions of accessibility and what it means to imagine Deaf space—the editors of this collection present its "keywords" in a similar gesture toward inclusive design.

The volume presents a series of sixty-two very brief essays written by a diverse and recognizable set of scholars from within the field, each addressing a different "keyword." One might expect these keywords to function as theoretical shorthand, translating the specialized work of expert practitioners for consumption by a wider audience. However, despite its superficial resemblance to a model of "access," such an approach assumes a hierarchical structure of knowledge production which both the editors and their contributors are careful to avoid. The keywords that make up the collection do not represent a list of field-specific buzzwords, painting instead in broad strokes around topics including "History," "Technology," "Rights," and "Ethics." This structure allows the field's themes and debates to emerge organically in the context of a broader interdisciplinary investigation.

Rather than devoting whole entries to "narrative prosthesis" or "debility," for example, explanations of these terms usefully emerge within entries on "Aesthetics" and "Disability." By refusing to enshrine a canon of influential scholars, the volume thus follows a democratizing ethos that foregrounds the field's complex and entangled genealogies. When terms that carry academic currency do appear in standalone entries, the contributions of individual theorists tend not to take center stage. Victoria Ann Lewis' entry on "Crip," for example, carefully historicizes the term, from its late nineteenth-century literary origins to disability activists' reclaiming of the term in the 1970s; the more recent academic revival of "crip" by scholars like Robert McRuer and Carrie Sandahl are included and explored but not overemphasized.

In this respect, the volume enacts another of its keywords—"Dependency." Unable to stand on their own, the concepts that emerge throughout Keywords are fundamentally relational, emerging though a set of mutually-dependent discourses. The question of physician-assisted suicide, for example, maps across the "Pain" and "Ethics," though it is taken up differently in each. Meanwhile, "Aesthetics," "Narrative," "Technology," and "Design" thematically interlink around shared preoccupations with cyborgs, prosthetics, and the politics of passing. Throughout the volume, these repetitions function as a kind of connective tissue or curb cut between entries, transporting the reader back and forth across the field's diverse interdisciplinary landscapes. In this way, the volume's entries function, architecturally, as a set of accessible entryways that have the potential to connect scholars across diverse fields.

Scholars of literature and critical race theory, for example, will encounter both familiar ground and uncharted territory in Ellen Samuels' entry on "Passing," which carefully negotiates how racial and gender passing might relate to "[s] uspicions of disability imposture." Similarly, Lisa Cartwright's entry on "Affect" provides a generous explanation of the affective turn in critical theory before turning to disability studies' more specific affective encounters with disgust, pity, and shame. More than simply making disability studies accessible to a wider audience, however, this strategy also functions to make strange our relationship to familiar concepts like "Citizenship," "Aesthetics," "Sexuality," or "Work." At the same time, scholars already writing within disability studies will find this volume useful for its conceptually rich mapping of the field's diverse...