Deaf Studies: Disability Studies Perspective and Controversy

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary academic field that focuses the social phenomenon of disability and its lived experience. This field seeks to understand and document historical and current contexts in which disability resides and attempts to understand and ameliorate the oppression that people with disabilities experience. As much as it is an academic field, Disability Studies is also political and promotes the inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of social, economic, and cultural life, with an emphasis on people with disabilities’ shared experience of oppression. Disability Studies closely aligns with feminist, queer, race, and other minority studies and uses similar theoretical perspectives to understand and study disability. For example, the oppression women have experienced and the historical view of women as weak and feeble has some similarities with the marginalization and systematic oppression of people with disabilities. These shared experiences have led to the development of fields of inquiry based on minority experiences: Disability Studies is similar to these fields. Disability Studies emerged in the United States (U.S.) as an area of academic research in the 1970s alongside the Disability Rights Movement (DRM) and has continued to expand and evolve. Disability Studies uses two main models to explain the disability experiences, the medical and social models of disability. Evolution of the field has led to criticism of the social model’s ability to adequately capture the disability experience. This has led to the beginning of a third view of disability, using a rights based/cultural/minority model. Though Deaf Studies could be considered a subfield of the broader Disability Studies, the two fields have differing foci and are, for the most part, separate. Controversial issues in Disability Studies and Deaf Studies have led to, until recently, very little collaboration between the fields.

Activism in Disability Studies has helped achieve many civil and social rights gains and improved the general quality of life for people with disabilities. Disability Studies in the U.S. developed from similar civil rights movements and from the DRM and gained strength with disability rights legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990), The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA,1990), and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2006). The ADA is considered to be a paramount rights-based document that mandates equal treatment of people with disabilities, on par with their able-bodied peers. In education, people with disabilities have gained significant rights with the IDEA, which mandates nondiscrimination in public education and maintains the right of all children to access public education on par with their peers. Internationally, the UNCRPD is a human rights–based document promoting the rights of people with disabilities and is used extensively in policy research within Disability Studies. The UNCRPD is also used to further establish standards of human rights for people with disabilities in the U.S. and internationally. One of the main U.S.–based organizations supporting Disability Studies from a perspective of disability as art, culture, and experience is the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). The SDS is a social-and humanities-based organization that supports and promotes the scholarly work of individuals in the Disability Studies field. The publication Disability Studies Quarterly is one of the premier scholarly journals that display Disability Studies work. Other journals dedicated to the field include Disability and Society, the Journal of Disability and Policy Studies, and the Review of Disability Studies.

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