Disability Studies

Disability Studies and Disability Rights

Disability studies functions as the theoretical arm of disability rights movements. As an interdisciplinary field of study and scholarship, disability studies analyzes the meanings attributed to human corporeal, sensory, and cognitive differences. Participants examine the role that disability serves in expressive traditions, scientific research, and social science applications. They study the status of disabled persons, often by [Page 479]attending to exclusionary scholarly models and professional structures. Interestingly, a key aspect of disability studies has involved focusing on the privilege that accrues to nondisabled persons within built environments. Implicitly, then, researchers question the ethics of inbuilt social exclusions by tracing out their origins. As a result, they track down many historical “genealogies” of practices and attitudes concerning disabled persons.

In seeking to understand the variety of interpretations that make disability an evident facet of human diversity, the field includes many methodologies such as quantitative assessment, qualitative interpretation, critical analysis, and historical genealogies. Nonetheless, because disability studies marks a departure from fields of knowledge and professional training that may have sustained exclusionary practices and mandated social shame, participants in disability studies primarily engage in efforts to reevaluate the implications of traditional approaches to disability. New scholarship proposes research topics that allow disability perspectives to emerge. As a result, the experiences that infuse life with a disability are valued for insights that can be culled for innovative strategies to assist new generations of disabled persons. Such disability perspectives bring to the forefront of cultural commentary a body of insight previously marginalized within many universities during an era of scholarship in which eugenics ideas prevailed.

It should be emphasized that disability studies initiatives, research projects, and curricula have been developed worldwide, with formations primarily in global urban centers and wealthy nation-states. This entry, however, will be limited to the United States, and to an extent, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Disability studies takes place when groups of committed advocates, activists, and scholars pursue work locally to make the persistence of disability exclusions across a variety of regional and global contexts better understood, documented, and interpreted. Only very recently, during the last decade of the twentieth century, did disability studies begin to be more generally recognized as an area of academic inquiry, while the moniker “disability studies” came into usage during the1980s. The new term sought to differentiate its concern with the well-being of disabled persons from what one scholar has termed the “disability business.” The disability business was perceived as a megalithic operation of management interests and government surveys that were frequently answerable to the goals of nondisabled persons at the expense of their disabled clients, family members, or neighbors.

At present, disability studies consists of a nascent, yet rapidly expanding scholarship that draws researchers from across a diversity of academic fields. Most universities have been inaccessible to disabled persons; as a consequence, scholars in disability studies observe the ways in which curricular ideas also suffer from this central exclusion, taking as a given that disability experiences offer a substantial vantage upon human existence. Because aspects of fields of study may reiterate the perpetuation of “able-ist” bias, disability studies can sometimes involve a rejection of habits, methods, and undertakings of universities in the past in their assumptions about bodies and capacities. Thus, disability studies also entails studying the myriad ways that traditional fields have been willing to study their topic from a distance without embracing the insights and critical perspectives of disabled persons concerning their own predicament. The distinction entails making claims for critical insights to be gained by partaking of disability-based experiences, knowledge, and lifestyles.

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