The Equality Act 2010 states that a person has a disability if they have a physical or mental impairment, and the impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. The major 2017 report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Being disabled in Britain: a journey less equal, demonstrated that Britain's thirteen million disabled people experience disadvantages in many areas of life, including education, work, standard of living, and participation.
In this section, you'll find information resources relating to disability themes. The resources include books, films, archives, and social media, and they examine disability issues from many perspectives, including history, society, politics, culture, literature, and more.
We hope you find the resources here and on our reading list informative and interesting, and as always, we welcome your suggestions for books and other resources to include.
Take a look at our EDI Reading List for Disability Equality.
Please get in touch if you have any recommendations to add to this list - whether already available in the Library or not!
This section highlights digitised and physical archives and special collections at Newcastle University and elsewhere, relating to disability topics. Materials in these archives cover centuries of history, and include images, data, interviews and much more.
A major resource for British social history from 1937-1967, it contains material generated by the Mass Observation social research organisation, including day surveys, diaries and subject directives from 1937-1967, a wide range of themed topic collections, together with other material such as images and essays.