This guide will assist you with finding information about disability studies.

Contact info

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Liaison Librarian for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Research process

Start Your Research Here -- This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.

Selected handbooks and encyclopedias

Encyclopedias

• Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook
• Encyclopedia of disability
• Routledge companion to disability and media
• Routledge handbook of disability activism
• Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media
• Routledge handbook of disability studies

Find books

The Library Catalogue provides access to books, journal articles, videos, government documents and much more. 

Library Catalogue search guide

Search the SFU Library Catalogue, either the Basic or the Advanced search

Note: In the searches below, search results can been limited to "Online Resources only" and "Resource type" of "Books". You can further limit by using "Subject"(left-hand column)

• crip* AND feminis*
• (disabilit* OR disabl*) AND femini*
• disability theory AND [topic words]
• (crip* OR disabl* OR disabilit*) AND (queer* OR transgender*)
• (crip* OR disabl* OR disabilit*) AND "social construction"
• (crip* OR disabl* OR disabilit*) AND theor*
• (crip* OR disabl* OR disabilit*) AND (race OR class OR gender)
• biomedicine AND (disabilit* OR disabled OR crip*) AND feminis*

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Use pulldown menu and select, "Source Types" as "Books"

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Selected books

Course readings

• Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness [print]
• Disability Politics & Theory [print]
• Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and liberation [print]
• Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race [print]
• Feminist, queer, crip 

Other

• Biopolitics of disability : neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment
• Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability
• Contours of Ableism : The Production of Disability and Abledness
• Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
• Critical disability theory : essays in philosophy, politics, policy, and law
• Dangerous discourses of disability, subjectivity and sexuality
• "Defects" : engendering the modern body [print]
• Disability : the basics
• Disability in dialogue 
• Disabling Domesticity
• Disability and aging : learning from both to empower the lives of older adults
• Disability and difference in global contexts : enabling a transformative body politic
• Disability, globalization and human rights
• Disability media studies
• Disability Rights Movement : From Charity to Confrontation
• Disability studies: Enabling the humanities [print]
• Disability studies reader
• Disability studies: Enabling the humanities [print]
• Dis/ability studies : theorising disablism and ableism
• Disability: the basics
• Disability Theory
• Education, Equality and Human Rights: Issues of Gender, 'Race', Sexuality, Disability and Social Class
• Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body [print]
• Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture
• Feminist disability studies [print]
• Feminist Perspectives on Disability
• Feminist theory and the body: a reader [print]
• Interdisciplinary approaches to disability
• Living the edges : a disabled women's reader
• Making Equality: History of Advocacy and persons with Disability in Canada [in print]
• Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment
• People with disabilities sidelined or mainstreamed?
• Racialized bodies, disabling worlds storied lives of immigrant Muslim women / Parin Dossa
• Reconstructing motherhood and disability in the age of "perfect" babies
• Rejected body : feminist philosophical reflections on disability / Susan Wendell
• Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation [print]
• Research in social science and disability [series title]
• Restricted Access: Lesbians on disability [print]
• Social inclusion of people with disabilities : national and international perspectives
• Uncanny Bodies : Superhero Comics and Disability
• Untold stories : a Canadian disability history reader 
• Women with visible and invisible disabilities : multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies

Subject headings

Browse Books in the Library Catalogue Using Subject Headings

Catalogue Search / Browse then change "Title" to "Subject" and enter your subject term, for example:

• Disability studies
• Disabled persons
• Discrimination against people with disabilities
• People with disabilities -- Social conditions
• Sexuality and Disability
• Sociology of disability
• Women with disabilities

Find journal articles

Databases let you easily to search for articles from within scholarly journals for a discipline.

• How to find journal articles tutorial. 
• What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?

If the full-text of the article is not available within the database then use the "Get@SFU" link to find it or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

• Women's Studies International -- For issues related to gender, sexuality and women's studies
• ProQuest Sociology Collection - for issues related to class, gender, racism, sexuality and sexism and theoretical and applied sociology, social science, and policy science. For information of immigrants, racism, society, structural barriers, etc.
• Social Sciences Full Text  - Index for social science journals
• Academic Search Premier. Multidisciplinary index to academic & popular journals. 
• CBCA Fulltext Reference - For Canadian perspectives
• ELDIS - OPEN ACCESS - Current research and policy documents on international development issues
  • "Disability in gender"

Selected journals

Simplest way to search for a particular journal is to search for it by "journal name" in the A to Z journals list (from Library's Home page).

• Cultural Critique
• Disability and Society
• Disability, Handicap and Society
• Disability Studies Quarterly
• Gender and Education
• Journal on Developmental Disabilities
• NWSA journal : an official publication of the National Women's Studies Association
• Social Theory and Practice

Government documents

Canada

International

• UN Women
  • Search results for "disabled" and "disabilities"
• International Labour Organization
  • ILO - Disability and work

Websites

• ACORN Canada - Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now 
  • Search results for "disability"
• BC Poverty Reduction Coalition's website
• PovNet - Building an online anti-poverty community (B.C. Poverty Reduction Coalition)

Library guides

• Library Research Tutorials. Animated tutorials on search techniques for finding books and journal articles.
• Annotated bibliographies
• Evaluating sources
• How to find journal articles
• Library Catalogue search guide
• What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?
• What is plagiarism?  Guide to common forms of plagiarism and how to avoid them

Writing help

See the Student Learning Commons for expert and friendly help with academic writing, learning, and study strategies.