Challenging geographies of ableness: celebrating how far we’ve come and what's left to be done

Abstract

As we write this introduction, it is 'Canada Day', a collective celebration of our country's history and accomplishments. It is a brief moment of coming together, to celebrate the good things this country has done and what many of us believe in and stand for. It is a brief respite, also, from acknowledging the many things we could have done better and indeed have to do better in the future. In a time of neo-liberal rule, globalisation, and the devaluing of so many human lives in so many ways, it is an interlude which we badly need. It seems a fitting tribute to the geographers' whose work is included in this collection, and to the many disabled children, women and men still excluded from Canadian society and space, and from societies world-wide, to seize this moment to also celebrate how far social geographies of disablement have come, and to consider where we go from here. Thirteen years have passed since one of us, at the time still pretty new to academia, lost her able body and all the privileges and 'normalcy' that pertains to such ways of being embodied in our world. Biomedically, this resulted from an immune system failure (manifest in rheumatoid arthritis). While the causes of such biomedical failures in women's bodies are not yet scientifically known, it has always seemed pretty reasonable to hypothesise that this was an outcome of the severe stresses associated with being a lone female faculty member in a department, working in radical and feminist geographies of urban change, subject to prolonged harassment and the intolerance of certain colleagues toward cutting edge geographic research informed by critical social theories of power and oppression. What is sad is that although disablement and a hostile work environment were certainly connected, few colleagues in leadership positions provided any form of support or encouragement. Instead, being a disabled woman became yet another reason to oppress and exclude: allowing colleagues who did so to affirm their own ableness, superiority and importance. Clearly in this, as in so many other cases, there is a lot of work to be done in unsettling the smug arrogance, privilege and indifference of ableness in academia. It is encouraging to see that the scholars whose work appears in this issue have taken this challenge seriously and politically; not just the means to the end of an academic career but as a systemic issue of discrimination that those of us privileged enough to work in academia have a responsibility to bring to the forefront of social debate. Too often, as disabled people throughout the world will readily confirm, disability research has oppressed and exploited them: researching their lives but excluding them in how the results gathered are translated into knowledge and applied. Slogans such as 'nothing about us without us' capture this reality from disabled peoples' perspectives quite well. The wide-ranging substantive topics covered in the papers in this collection capture the increasing breadth and sophistication of research concerned with issues pertaining to disability in society and space. They also crosscut a range of geographic scales: from the intimately personal scale of an individual female academic body disabled through repetitive strain syndrome (Guelke 2003) and that of a young man dying of HIV/Aids in Vancouver (Dyck and O'Brien 2003) through to sites within local communities such as schools, homes and support networks, where for instance young D/deaf youth struggle for affirmation of their differenced (from the hearing) selves (Skelton and Valentine 2003), to national and international scales at which state regulation of disability issues and processes of disablement unfold (e.g. England 2003; Lemon and Lemon 2003). Papers such as Gold's (2003) challenge us to rethink what constitutes 'the field' and fieldwork in research; conceptions which typically presume an able-bodiedness which not all can attain or, over the life course, maintain. …