Book Review by Anna Stenning James McGrath, The Naming of Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity. Rowman and Littlefield International 2019 [paperback version], 272 pages. ISBN 9781783480418 In an article for the Poetry Society, Joanna Limburg explained that her collection The Autistic Alice[1] approached the issue of what it meant to write as an autistic subject […]
Latest articles
‘Never Forget’: Fictionalising the Holocaust Survivor with Dementia
Article Summary by Sue Vice I was prompted to think about the topic of Holocaust survivors with dementia by reading Emma Healey’s intriguing 2014 novel Elizabeth is Missing. The novel’s premise is that the central character Maud, who lives with an undiagnosed condition of memory-loss, can nonetheless solve a wartime mystery because her long-term recall […]
Accessing Health—and Continuing Research—in a Time of Lockdown: Covid-19 and LJMU’s Liverpool Health Commission
Blog by Gerard Diver LJMU’s Liverpool Health Commission (2019-2020) is a UK-wide project aimed at influencing the development of health policies in relation to the first 1000 days of life (covering the period from conception to age two). Prior to the arrival of the Coronavirus, the Commission had spent seven months gathering oral evidence from […]
Disability, Visibility and the COVID-19 Crisis
Podcast Interview with Alice Wong Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant. She is the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Alice is also a co-partner in four projects: DisabledWriters.com, a resource to […]
The Impact of Communication on Access to Genetic Testing for Limited English Proficient Populations
The last time my grandmother returned from the doctor’s office, she handed me a pamphlet that explained her condition and the different procedures she could undergo. Then she asked me what she should do. As an immigrant from Nicaragua, her preferred language is Spanish. Even though she knows basic English, it’s difficult for her to […]
Medicus: The Power of Knowledge—A Novel Approach to Medical History
Exhibition Review by Prof Desmond O’Neill, MD, FRCPI The closing of an innovative exhibition of medical history in the ancient German city of Speyer may seem to be a small loss in the context of the many enormous tragic losses of life and livelihood of Covid-19. However, medical history has insights to offer on how […]
Death in Isolation: The Covid-19 Dead Are More Than Numbers
Blog by Avril Tynan We are in the midst of a pandemic for which we are woefully unprepared. Our priorities now, quite rightly, are to minimize the losses—both personal and ultimately economic. Our anticipative strategies for prevention have become plans for mitigation and—hopefully, one day—recovery. We are growing accustomed, in a terrifying—and, for most generations, […]
Things and Trends: Images of COVID-19
Blog by Annamaria Carusi Images of COVID19 are powerful in their own right and subtly or not so subtly inform how we relate to this pandemic. There are, of course, many COVID19 images, which will no doubt yield rich analyses in good time. I offer here just a quick impression of two kinds of images […]
“Make COVID-19 Visuals Gross”
Provocation by Kristin Marie Bivens and Marie Moeller The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) medical illustration that represents the novel coronavirus has become the emblem of COVID-19 and the pandemic. In a recent reverse image search, the image returned 5,260,000,000 results in 1.84 seconds. These numbers—over five billion—suggest that the CDC’s image of […]
Better Access for the Disabled–Insights from the COVID 19 Pandemic
Blog by Aneesh Basheer Much of the response to the COVID 19 pandemic from governments, health authorities and volunteer organizations has neglected people with disabilities. While this is generally true during concerted response to any sort of disasters, the current COVID 19 situation offers particular insights into the intrinsic ableism of our society while also […]