Beth A. Haller, Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World (1st ed.)

Her expertise is shaped both by her long career documenting disability media and by her own experiences as a neurodiverse person with multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses.Haller's overarching argument is that disabled people are not merely subjects of media representation but are increasingly confronting marginalization by becoming producers, directors, journalists, performers, and digital creators.By using new and emerging platforms, disabled creators carve out spaces that reflect their realities and challenge long-standing stereotypes in the media landscape.Haller seeks to shift the conversation away from the usual question-"How are disabled people represented in the media?"-andtoward a more long-overdue focus on disabled people as producers taking an active role in shaping contemporary media culture.Haller's project is extremely ambitious.She draws from textual analysis, case studies, interviews, and close readings of media across multiple genres.This is necessary given the book's expansive and diverse scope.However, the book would have benefited from more transparency behind the choices she utilizes for her analyses.It is unclear as she alternates between mainstream commercial projects and lesser-known but critically acclaimed projects.While she acknowledges the abundance of material, stating that she "found more examples from disabled media creators than I could ever use" (p.20), the rationale for her final selections remains unclear.Haller begins in chapter 1 by examining how disabled creators push back against long-standing ableist storytelling conventions in both traditional and streaming media.While she analyzes well-known works like Switched at Birth (p.35) and CODA (p.36), the real value of this chapter lies in how she reworks established disability studies frameworks to highlight disabled authorship rather than simply representation.Her use of narrative prosthesis (Mitchell & Snyder, 2001; p. 27) shows how disabled creators interrupt the old pattern of disability functioning as a plot device and instead reshape narrative meaning by participating in writing, casting, and production.In chapter 4, when she turns to the Affirmative Model of Disability (Swain & French, 2000; p. 116) alongside Jason Mittell's (2015) ideas about complex TV (p.131), she is not simply cataloging theories but showing how different creative environments allow more expansive disability storytelling.Together, these frameworks help situate Haller's argument alongside works like Sami Schalk's (2022) Black Disability Politics and Alice Wong's (2020) Disability Visibility that center disabled creators as