Guides: One Book One SP2 2023-24: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century / Alice Wong: Home

The Book: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong (Editor)
Call Number: Van Pelt Library - HV1552.3 .D57 2020
Publication Date: 2020
"One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent-but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act." -- book description

Ways to access Disability Visibility

Print

Van Pelt holds two print copies
The Free Library of Philadelphia holds a number of print copies
Everything checked out? Try requesting a print copy from interlibrary loan

Ebook

Penn Libraries has a 1-user ebook copy via EBSCO
We also have an ebook copy on Overdrive, accessible through the Libby app. Read up on how to set up the Libby app on our Overdrive Guide.
The Free Library of Philadelphia also has an ebook copy on Overdrive through Libby. You can access both your FLP and Penn Libraries Overdrive content in the same Libby app.

Audiobook

Penn Libraries has access to the audiobook on Overdrive, accessible through the Libby app. Read up on how to set up the Libby app on our Overdrive Guide.
The Free Library of Philadelphia also has an audiobook copy on Overdrive through Libby.

Plain Language Summary

Disability Visibility has also been translated, with permission, into a plain language text version, freely accessible online. A plain language summary is an effort to make a scholarly, discipline-specific, or jargon-heavy text more accessible to an external audience.

Book Reviews

Review of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century edited by Alice Wong
Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter 2021, Vol. 41 No. 1. Reviewed by Brenna Swift
Book World: What it means to live with a disability in America
Washington Post (July 24, 2020). Reviewed by Anna Leahy. Disability Visibility is reviewed alongside two other books.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
Disability Arts Online (August 3, 2020). Reviewed by Nila Gupta.
‘Disability Visibility,’ edited by Alice Wong
Broad Street Review (Sept. 8, 2020). Reviewed by Alaina Johns.

Archival collections

Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century
Presents monographs (books), manuscripts, and ephemera that provide a historical view of disabilities from the seventeenth to twentieth century. The archive demonstrates how persons with disabilities have worked for equal rights through activism and advocacy. Materials include personal memoirs of experiences with disabilities or the accounts of those who treated them. Rehabilitation, treatments, methods of education, and other forms of remediation are documented. Reports and proceedings of organizations and institutions that sought to help or heal those with disabilities are available for review. Policies and programs concerning persons with disabilities are also available (i.e. labor laws, legal rights, rehabilitation programs, etc.).
Harvey Finkle photographs
As part of the One- Book, One SP2 theme for 2023-2024, Finkle's photographs were displayed at SP2's Caster Building."Harvey Finkle (born March 28, 1934) is a self-taught documentary photographer who has documented the social, economic, cultural, and political issues in the city of Philadelphia and across the globe. Finkle's work largely focuses on marginalized communities, including low income and homeless families, homeless veterans, refugees, immigrants, and the disabled, to name only a few. This collection, dating from 1968 to 2019, contains a majority of Finkle's five-decade-long oeuvre, in various formats including prints, contact sheets, negatives, slides, research, interview transcripts, and publications." -- from finding aid.

More on the Disability Visibility Project

Disability Visibility Project
Founded by Alice Wong, "the Disability Visibility Project is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture." -- website description
Disability Visibility Podcast
A 100-episode run hosted by Alice Wong, who hosts conversations on disability justice, intersectionality, and individual work experiences.
Community as Home Portraits
A series of portraits by artist Ashanti Fortson in collaboration with Alice Wong depicting disabled people in relation to the world and to others, often accompanied by textual quotes and in-image captions.

A web illustration by Ashanti Fortson from the Community as Home Portraits project. In the image, two people, Pauline Vetuna and Ruby Allegra from the QBIPOC Collective, sit down, smiling, to coffee together, with papers floating fancifully above their heads. The papers collectively read, "What is also beautiful and exciting is the opportunity to co-create together the kind of spaces we want to see but have been denied in the world as it currently is."

Finding other first-person stories from disabled writers

Franklin Catalog identifies books, journals, videos, and sound recordings - in print and electronic formats - available for you to read.

More memoirs and personal narratives from authors with disabilities

How does that search work?

Franklin Catalog uses Library of Congress (LC) subject headings and subject heading subdivisions to describe books, videos, and audio recordings. The LC heading most associated with disability narratives is "People with disabilities."

The Franklin search above combines "People with disabilities" with other subject heading keyword terms which would indicate a personal account, such as autobiographies, biographies, and personal narratives. All together, the search looks like this:

Subject heading keyword: ("people with disabilities")
AND
Form/Genre heading keyword: (essays OR biographies OR autobiographies OR "personal narratives")

The results have been limited to books and sorted by date descending.

Encountering Ableist and Offensive Language in Franklin

We understand that LC subject headings, often created decades ago and facing bureaucratic change processes, can be outdated, ableist, and offensive. Penn Libraries' DEI Discovery Working Group routinely tries to mitigate harm caused by subject headings by updating and providing alternative language when possible. Please see their Statement of Harmful Language in Penn Libraries Catalogs for more details, including a reporting form.

One Book One SP2 2023-24: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century / Alice Wong: Home

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