Disability, Geography of

Abstract

In recent years, the sociospatial causes and consequences of disability (i.e., of being socially constructed as negatively different on the basis of mental or physical bodily impairment), has become a significant focus of critical geographic inquiry. These studies treat disability not as a given consequence of bodily impairment, but as a sociospatial process of marking impaired bodies as negatively ‘other’ and, on the basis of this negative difference, marginalizing and excluding the disabled from spaces of everyday life. Critical geographies of disability are thus as much about ableism as a regime of power based on able-bodied privilege and the sociospatial practices that sustain it, as about disabled persons' experiences of trying to negotiate environments that physically and/or socially exclude and oppress them. The development of critical geographies of disability is best understood as a response to both changing conditions within society, and new perspectives on the differences disabilities make in how people are situated (physically, economically, politically, and culturally) within prevailing social relations of power in specific localities, cities, and regions. The former include an increasingly vocal and visible disability rights movement at national and global scales, aging populations with increased vulnerability to and experiences of disability, the restructuring and downsizing of social assistance to vulnerable groups which has exacerbated and drawn attention to the grinding poverty that disabled people face. New perspectives on disability have also encouraged critical studies of disability and space. The growth of disability studies has drawn attention to a wide range of disability issues, challenged conventional biomedical models of disability with ‘social constructionist’ alternatives, and offered significant glimpses of what it is like to be disabled in today's societies and spaces of everyday life. Within Geography, the growing influence of critical social theory, feminist geographic research highlighting how social differences become bases of spatial and social exclusion, recognition of multiple bases of oppression in society, and concerns to use geographic knowledge as a basis for empowering disadvantaged groups, have helped to encourage critical approaches to disability and space.