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9781479879953

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Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations. -- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

Alison Piepmeier's Unexpected: Parenting, Prenatal Testing, and Down Syndrome calls our attention to issues relating to reproductive rights and abortion and considers them in ways far more complex and nuanced than usually is the case in our current heated debates. Unequivocally pro-choice, Piepmeier creates a site of resistance to dominant and dehumanizing cultural stereotypes regarding the supposed tragedy of having a disabled child. She speaks not just to the community of people with Down syndrome and those living with intellectual and/or physical differences and their supporters, but to everyone who is concerned with reproductive justice. Offering universal insights that go beyond the special and the inclusive, she grapples with key questions such as what it means to be both a person and a citizen, and she presents a compelling vision of a just society for citizens of all abilities. -- Chris Gabbard, author of A Life Beyond Reason: A Father's Memoir Alison Piepmeier was an extraordinary person-- and a wonderfully versatile and effective scholar, essayist, and activist. In Unexpected, George Estreich and Rachel Adams have done her justice: they have assembled her final work on disability justice and reproductive rights, together with her bracing analyses of disability memoir, capping it off with two powerful essays on the legacy Alison leaves behind. Unexpected is literally a labor of love, and the world is a brighter place for it. -- Michael Berube, author of Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations. -- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations. --Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

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Alison Piepmeier was Director and Professor of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. She was the author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, among other books.

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