Disability Studies

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through 10 case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among individuals born blind, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Kaschak's work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see. She exposes gender, race, and sexual orientation as unconscious and pre-verbal in the sighted, an aspect of implicit bias.

We’ve all had moments of feeling like we didn’t belong, but imagine being born into a world where fitting in was never an option. Michele Sullivan, who has a rare form of dwarfism, shares how her physical posture taught her the most effective relational posture with others, which helped her become one of the most powerful women in philanthropy.

A Rocky Start feels like a potential classic: an authentic treatise on the state of America's mental health establishment and the help or damage it metes out to people who desperately need its services, written by someone who knows that world intimately, from inside both its real and perceived walls. Fisher describes A Rocky Start as "a candid and rare look into one particularly complex life." It is that and more. Fisher's natural intelligence drives the narrative.