Disability oftentimes tends to be associated with misfortune, personal tragedy, passivity, and dependency. However, a closer look at the actual history of the disabled people’s movement and disability studies reveals stories of imagining disability and therefore societies differently. The lineage of envisioning the world through the prism of the possible (rather than impossible) is not complete without including the theorization and politicization of disability – that in the past few decades has gained intellectual momentum. In the following paragraphs, we map the most critical turning points in those academic and activist developments.
Disability Studies as an Academic Counterpart of the Disabled People’s Movement
In the 1970s, the British group of disabled people, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), contributed hugely to changing the dominant paradigm in thinking about disability, a dominant view that framed it as a medical and individual problem. In a...
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Notes
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Intellectual disability is a developmental disorder characterized by a decrease in the general level of intellectual functioning and deficits in adaptive behavior.
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Goodley, D., Szarota, M., Wołowicz, A. (2020). Possible and Disability. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_64-1
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