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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Jennifer Natalya Fink, "All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship" (Beacon Press, 2022)
Description: Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered exceptional? In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon Press, 2022), disability studies scholar Jennifer Natalya Fink argues that this originates in our families. When we cut a disabled member out of the family story, disability remains a trauma as opposed to a shared and ordinary experience. This makes disability and its diagnosis traumatic and exceptional.Weaving together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research, Fink illustrates how th...