Negotiating the Social Borderlands: Portraits of Young People with Disabilities and Their Struggles for Positive Relationships provides readers with narratives of the lives of three young people with significant disabilities.

The author uses portraiture to narrate the stories of three young people and to capture the myriad dimensions of each unique individual. These portraits expose a balance between empirical description and aesthetic expression and provide a singular view into the nuances and complexities of each young person’s life, while depicting their unique social contexts and how they fit within those milieux.

Never losing sight of the dimensions of the selves of these notable young people and the contexts in which they exist, the author presents the qualitative techniques of inquiry she used to examine the complexities involved in the co-constructions of meaning among the young people and their communication partners. Without wavering, she explores their deep relationships and the contexts where positive reciprocal relationships developed between young people with disabilities and nondisabled people and how these relationships evolved from the perspectives of the participants. 

Negotiating the Social Borderlands, an unapologeticpresentation of a remarkable set of portrait narratives, is written for a broad audience and, thus, offers an inherently complex and sensitive portrayal of three personal stories in which a variety of contextualized issues can be examined and discussed in light of each readers’ practices, policies, and perspectives.