disability studies

disability studies, an interdisciplinary area of study based in the humanities and social sciences that views disability in the context of culture, society, and politics rather than through the lens of medicine or psychology. In the latter disciplines, “disability” is typically viewed as a distance from the “norm” in order to bring the disabled closer to the established norm. This area of study questions that view and presents a variety of perspectives on disability, from contemporary society as well as from a range of cultures and histories. Seeking to broaden the understanding of disability, to better understand the experience of disability in society, and to contribute to social change for people with disabilities, the discipline challenges the idea of the normal-abnormal binary and suggests that a range of human variations are “normal.”

Like African American studies, women’s studies, and Latino/a studies, which were outgrowths of the civil rights and women’s movements, disability studies’ roots are in the disability rights movement of the 1960s. In the United Kingdom the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), formed in 1972, was instrumental in politicizing disability in the U.K. and abroad. In the United States the disability rights movement advocated for legislation relating to the civil rights of individuals with regard to employment, education, and accessible transportation. Inspired by UPIAS, the Society for Disability Studies (SDS; originally Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability [SSCIID]) was started in 1982 by a group of American academics led by activist and writer Irving Zola. Michael Oliver, a disabled sociologist, helped to push the movement into academia with his book Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (1990), in which he analyzed how a social issue such as disability gets cast as an individual medicalized phenomenon.

While the political movements initially led social scientists to explorations of disability, researchers in the arts and humanities have also taken up the study of disability. The interdisciplinarity that characterizes the field allows for a variety of methodologies and approaches to be applied to the study of disability. Some of those include narratives of disability; analysis of representations of disability in literature, the arts, the law, and the media; challenges to the absence of disabled researchers in academia; the writing or rewriting of histories of disability; creation of visual art, performance, and poetry that highlights the experiences of disabled people in a world built for the nondisabled; philosophies of justice that speak directly to the interests of the disabled; and narratives and analyses of the experience of living with a disability and how that intersects with race, class, and gender.