The Disability Resource Center (DRC) has compiled a list of recommended books by disabled writers, activists, and scholars. This list is non-exhaustive and is meant to serve as a starting place to learn about disability justice, disability identity, and anti-ableism.
UCSF staff, faculty, and learners may request to borrow of any of the books below. For more information, contact [email protected].
Disability Resource Center Books
Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of our Movement is Our People. A disability justice primer. Sins Invalid. (2019). Second edition.
Skin, Tooth, and Bone is a Disability Justice Primer based in the work of Patty Berne and Sins Invalid.
Ladau, E. (2021). Demystifying disability what to know, what to say, and how to be an ally. Ten Speed Press.
Demystifying Disability is a beginners guide to understanding disability and strategies for being a better ally to disabled people.
Wong, A. (2020). Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Edited by Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century is an anthology that features essays from thirty-seven disabled writers who provide an intersectional analysis into what it means to be a disabled person in the twenty-first century.
Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
In this collection of essays, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha provides an overview of the Disability Justice framework, a movement that centers disabled queer, trans, BIPOC perspectives.
Schalk, S. (2022, October). Black Disability Politics. Duke University Press.
Open Access copy of Black Disability Politics
In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present.
Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvr33d50
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center.