Disability Studies Research Articles

Coming Out as Undocumented: Identity Celebrations and Political Change

By focusing on the notion of ‘coming out as undocumented’, this concept paper critically explores whether identity politics has the potential to transform dominant ‘illegalisation’ processes. It argues that although the coming out strategy has helped make marginalised communities more visible and audible, it does not necessarily help disrupt dominant stigmas. Drawing upon insights from Disability Studies and Fat and Queer Politics, it suggests that the celebration of stigmatised identities through coming out events does not necessarily disrupt and transform unequal systems. What is needed is a radical shift in focus: from identity celebration to political projects, from an ‘unliveable’ present to an inclusive tomorrow.

Using Poetry and Disability Memoir to Explore Veteran Teachers’ Emerging Awareness of Ableism

Abstract This study explored how thirteen veteran teachers grappled with an emerging awareness of the pervasive nature of ableism in education during a professional development series utilizing disability memoir and critical reflection. Grounded in disability studies in education and studies in ableism, this poetic inquiry explored the research question: how does professional development centering ableism and disability memoir support teachers to critically reflect on their beliefs and practices related to inclusion? Findings are shared through polyvocal transcription poems highlighting the conflicts teachers experienced learning about ableism. The poems captured the difficult initial steps on teachers’ journeys towards embracing inclusive mindsets.

Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions

This article conveys how taking patient knowledge seriously can improve patient experience and further medical science. In clinical contexts related to infection-associated chronic conditions and other complex chronic illnesses, patient...

Crip sovereignty

Crip theory traces a line of flight away from liberal disability studies in the direction of an ethics of degradation which revels in and exploits disability’s destabilising and disruptive potential. The danger of such an ethics, however, is that it risks romanticising disability and, in so doing, unintentionally underwriting ableist prejudices by continuing to index human worth to the capacity for self-determination, here in the form of a subversive “indeterminacy” and “heterogeneity”. Georges Bataille’s work can supplement crip theory insofar as it likewise joyfully affirms the scandalousness of degradation (uselessness, waste, etc.) while grounding this affirmation in an ontology of productive life überhaupt that shifts the responsibility for transgression from the individual onto society. For Bataille, more specifically, the point is that there is a categorical imperative to celebrate degradation as the a priori condition of a collective commitment to prevent global catastrophic suffering.

Analyzing constructions of disability in everyday talk: Methodological applications of discursive psychology

ABSTRACT In this methodological paper, we respond to the call to advance a disability justice agenda within social science research. To do so, we invite readers to engage with the intersections of discursive psychology and disability theories. Specifically, we forward new possibilities for methodologically and theoretically leveraging discursive psychology to study disability, ableism, and anti-ableism as they unfold in everyday life. To do so, we offer a general overview of core concepts from some disability studies perspectives and point to the possibilities of discursive psychology engaging at the level of theory and methodology with these perspectives.

Poverty (Number 1 Goal of the SDG) of Disabled People through Disability Studies and Ability Studies Lenses: A Scoping Review

According to the World Bank, the world will not meet the SDG of ending extreme poverty in 2030. Disabled people live disproportionally below the poverty line. Many societal developments and discussions can influence the poverty level of disabled people. This study aimed to better understand the academic engagement with the poverty of disabled people in general and in Canada. To fulfill this aim, we performed a scoping review of academic abstracts obtained from SCOPUS, the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST, and Web of Science. We performed a frequency count and a content analysis of abstracts containing the terms “poverty” or “impoverish*” or “socioeconomic” or “SES” or “income”. We ascertained how the abstracts engaged with the poverty of disabled people in general and in Canada and in conjunction with keywords linked to a select set of societal developments and discussions we saw as impacting poverty and being impacted by poverty. We also looked at the use of concepts coined to discuss ability judgments and social problems with being occupied, two areas that impact the poverty of disabled people. We found that disabled people were mentioned in 0.86% of the abstracts using the term “poverty” in general and 4.1% (88 abstracts) for Canada. For the terms “impoverish*”, “socioeconomic”, “SES”, and “income”, the numbers were 3.15% in general and 0.94% for Canada. The poverty of disabled people who also belong to other marginalized groups was rarely covered. Our qualitative content analysis revealed that many of the hit-count positive abstracts did not cover the poverty of disabled people. We found 22 relevant abstracts that covered the poverty of disabled people in conjunction with technologies, eight in conjunction with accessibility not already mentioned under technology, eight with intersectionality, seven with “activis*” or advocacy, three with sustainability, two with climate change, and none for burnout or ally. The occupation and ability judgment-focused concepts were rarely or not at all employed to discuss the poverty of disabled people. Our findings suggest many gaps in the coverage of the poverty of disabled people that need to be fixed.

Cash Cows and Dogs with Dentures: Prostheses for Animals in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Abstract This article shows how the history of prostheticized animals is much deeper and richer than one might think. Investigating the interest in fitting animals with prostheses throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, this article explores the emergence of animal prostheses in bovine agriculture through to their use in late Victorian pet keeping. The key concern of this piece is the varied responses to prostheticized animals in print culture. As this article shows through an analysis of magazine and newspaper contributions, reactions to animal prostheses varied from admiration and amazement to annoyance and disgust. By analysing this coverage, the article reveals how representations of animal prostheses brought into collision a surprising variety of important social discourses, including those related to economic productivity, prosthesis access, food adulteration, professional recognition, social norms, class hierarchies, and gender relations. Animal prostheses proved a novel yet apt image that distilled a wide variety of societal concerns. Redirecting the critical momentum established by recent scholarship that unites disability studies and critical animal studies, this article uses nineteenth-century animal prostheses as a case study to demonstrate how the concepts of disability, ableism, classism, and misogyny have been extended by humans across species boundaries and how our approaches to nonhuman care are impacted by them. It therefore establishes a new field of inquiry within Victorian studies for scholarship on the interface between discourses of disability and nonhuman animals.

What Misfitting Makes

Weaving together personal experience, disability studies scholarship, and art criticism, this paper explores the relationship between embodied experience of the world and the demands placed on us to conform to it. Misfitting forces us to recognize the fundamental distinction between flesh and world, and with it both the limits and possibilities of the human capacity to act and to be. The fundamental misfit all humans share is that we emerge from the sheltering womb into a material world that is indifferent to our individual existence. That is to say, mortality is the fundamental misfit of the human condition. It is in this sense that flesh emplaced in world is always a relationship of misfitting. The existential and social repair that misfitting calls for is attentive care and love, an attitude of welcome and openness to all body-minds, whether expected or unexpected, whether fit or misfit.

Learning from disability studies to introduce the role of the individual to naturalistic accounts of disease

Disability studies have been successfully focusing on individuals' lived experiences, the personalization of goals, and the constitution of the individual in defining disease and restructuring public understandings of disability. Although they had a strong influence in the policy making and medical modeling of disease, their framework has not been translated to traditional naturalistic accounts of disease. I will argue that, using new developments in evolutionary biology (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis [EES] about questions of proper function) and behavioral ecology (Niche conformance and construction about the questions of reference classes in biostatistics accounts), the main elements of the framework of disability studies can be used to represent life histories at the conceptual level of the two main “non-normative” accounts of disease. I chose these accounts since they are related to medicine in a more descriptive way. The success of the practical aspects of disability studies this way will be communicated without causing injustice to the individual since they will represent the individuality of the patient in two main naturalistic accounts of disease: the biostatistical account and the evolutionary functional account. Although most accounts criticizing the concept of disease as value-laden do not supply a positive element, disability studies can supply a good point for descriptive extension of the concept through inclusion of epistemic agency.

American Folklore Studies and Disability: An Introduction

Abstract As an introduction to the special issue on folklore and disability, this essay offers a brief overview of how concerns about disability have historically been included in folklore studies in the United States. It discusses the field of disability studies and how folklore has been an important element of disability theory and writing. In making an argument for how a more serious engagement with disability studies theory and writing can enhance US folkloristics, the essay further suggests the development of a subfield of folklore devoted to disability and folklore.

“You may now become who you thought was disposable”: COVID-19 Politics and Ableism

Abstract This essay critically examines the intersection of COVID-19, Long COVID, ableism, and health care disparities in the United States, emphasizing the transformative impact of COVID-19 as a mass disabling event with a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. I also bring an autoethnographic lens to my experience of COVID-19 and Long COVID, underscoring the importance of recognizing the diverse and often untellable experiences of individuals with disabilities and challenging the prevailing ableist perspectives embedded in society. I raise ethical considerations of storytelling in the context of Long COVID and urge researchers to embrace empathy and a more inclusive approach that challenges traditional notions of objectivity and distancing within academic research. I call for a collaborative approach between disability studies and folklore studies, encouraging scholars to interrogate and explore the traditions shaped by experiences of disability.

Folklore Made Me Disabled: Integrating Disability Studies into Folklore Research

Abstract Persons outside of disability communities often have negative perceptions of disabilities, yet such beliefs may create more problems for people with disabilities than the disability itself. Folklore produced in disability communities can serve as a reaction to those misconceptions and can allow us to better understand what disability means to disabled individuals and how it affects their ways of being and interpreting the world. Folklorists undertaking such research must approach collaborators with respect, care, and background knowledge so they don't risk reproducing harmful stereotypes. Through this disability studies lens, folklorists have an opportunity to build on and complicate our understanding of disability experiences through exploring how disabled people use folklore to (re)present their identities.

Transitioning to adulthood for young disabled people: imagining new futurities while walking-with

From a disability studies perspective, we want to understand how to support young disabled adults to belong in their local community once the postsecondary transition has arrived. The force of imagination in the search for possibilities other than the often-fixed normalised pathways is investigated by looking at some important life events of Wout, a young man with Down Syndrome. The researchers experiment with the method of intuition of Bergson ([1946] 1992) by becoming part of the events shared through ‘walking-with’ Wout. Hereto a tracing-mapping (Lenz Taguchi 2016) exercise is followed to explore the open possibilities in Wout’s future, particularly in connection to employment. A speculative approach offers a conceptual and practical way to build concrete utopias (Bloch 1986) for the inclusive future Wout and his network are shaping.

Reasonable accommodation and interdependence: revisiting the dynamics of disability inclusion in higher education in India

ABSTRACT The principle of reasonable accommodation according to Article 2 of the UNCRPD is defined as ‘necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden, where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or exercise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and fundamental freedoms’. Exploring the relationship between inclusive policies enacted in institutions of higher education in India, and their impact on those who claim accommodation, we discuss the nature of care that informs and animates such interactions. Drawing on feminist disability studies scholarship on care, particularly, Akemi Nishida’s recommendation that care is inherently collective we analyse two sets of transactions selected for study as enabling care in patronizing and charitable manners, while simultaneously ignoring the politics of responding to and providing accommodations. We find that institutional responses to accommodation claims are less reflective of the socio-political and affective aspects integral to the RA principle. Instead, the focus seems to be on providing either technocratic solutions or interpreting RA claims as causing undue burden. By reading the RA principle through the lens of scholarship on interdependence, we aim to broaden the scope of adopting and interpreting the RA principle.

Del fantástico a la representación realista

This article presents the main characteristics of the representation of dwarfism in Western audiovisuals. For this purpose, in addition to listing and commenting some of the most relevant films since German Expressionism, basic theoretical texts on disability studies have been employed, such as those by Tobin Siebers, and studies that deal with real experiences of people with dwarfism, like Erin Pritchard's books. The typical characteristics range from aspects of marvelous "dwarfs" that are occur in representations of people with dwarfism, to the presence of people with dwarfism as a composition of circus scenery, cripface - when people with no disability play the role of those with dwarfism - and what I define as "society on a reduced scale", that is, audiovisual narratives with entire communities formed by little people. The research also verifies that advances have begun to take place in the 21st century, but they are still sporadic or very much centered on the figure of a single actor. In conclusion, the survey of these characteristics aims to contribute to a better understanding of such patterns and the avoidance of their pejorative effects.

Will psychology ever ‘join hands’ with disability studies? Opportunities and challenges in working towards structurally competent and disability-affirmative psychotherapy for energy limiting conditions

Despite sustained efforts among critically informed scholars to integrate thinking from disability studies into psychology, the psy disciplines continue to largely neglect the lived experience of disabled people and overlook...

Laes, C., Goodey, C.F., Rose, M.L. (2013). Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite ad Calcem. Review by Nina Van der Sype

The volume Disabilities in Roman Antiquity brings together twelve contributions that are solely dedicated to the topic of physical and mental disability in the antique world. As there is already a wealth of research available on various aspects concerning the field of (critical) disability studies in contemporary culture, the editors actively contribute to expanding the area of investigation to pre-modern culture. Such explorations can shed light on particular aspects of disability, its individual experience and broader socio-cultural meanings which remain paramount within our modern culture, while at the same time developing the establishment of the subfield of ‘disability history’ within the period of Antiquity. The editors’ recognition of the – to a certain extent – universalist nature of both bodily and mental characteristics, leads to the rejection of a constructivist approach, a choice which they describe as being a ‘theoretical and practical disapproval based on the belief that we are all human beings, sharing certain corporal realities over different cultures and times’ (Laes et al., 2013, p. 6).

Risks of Imagination

This essay is inspired by a moment at the conclusion of Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023). It takes Belser’s stated desire to “know the sacred through a thousand disabled languages” as an invitation to think about the risks and rewards of imagining the divine in and through others’ differences. It places Belser’s insights in conversation with the author’s own research into mid-twentieth century Catholic engagements with cognitive impairment in the United States, what the essay calls “disability theology before disability theology,” and uses that conversation to return to what have been some enduring impasses in disability studies.

Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Literature has numerous dimensions, among which novels and short stories are worth the mention. Stories from the past have been including disabled male and female characters in their plots, but the question of how these characters have been depicted is still debatable. When it comes to writers of the disability study, it has been noticed that they have been trying to establish the present state of people with impairments with the help of their deformed or disabled characters. It has been witnessed that novels and short stories concentrate on bringing out the darker side of a disabled person by focusing on his/ her issues and sufferings. The objective of this paper is to expose that literary works rarely focus on the brighter facet of a disabled character, especially a woman. It projects the differences that are endured by fictional individuals. The analysis undertakes the theory of Intersectionality to support its arguments of projecting the discrepancies in the picturisations of disabled female dramatic personas in novels and short stories. Hence, the research with the aid of select prose narratives brings out the conventional sketches of fictional impaired women.

Shifting the Focus: Intra-acting with Diverse Agencies and Happy Objects in a Day Center of Disability Services

The article is based on the author’s experiences of facilitating creative movement groups in a disability services day center. Through artistic and performative research, she investigates different forms of agency in and around the movement groups. She draws on theoretical perspectives from critical disability studies, feminist new materialism and affect studies, par­ticularly focusing on Sara Ahmed’s (2010) notion of the “happy object,” to challenge the human-centric view of arts education and artistic agency. She proposes a shift of focus in arts education from individual agents to the intra-action of diverse agencies in art making, teaching, and learning in diverse contexts.