The Puzzling Place of Disability in Political Science (original) (raw)

Theorising Disability as Political Subjectivity: Work by the UIC Disability Collective on political subjectivities

Disability & Society, 2002

Disability studies has shown how therapeutic professionals and people with disabilities occupy opposite sides of a deep cultural divide, one that arti cially bisects normalcy from 'abnormalcy'. The philosophy of political subjectivity provides an opportunity to analyse the fraught nexus that exists between institutions and those who navigate them as professionals and 'clients'. Our essay seeks to theorise the subject positions that emerge as a result of this often volatile intersection by offering up four critical vignettes: (1) an analysis of the systems and networks that characterise disabled transport within the Chicago Transit Authority; (2) speech therapy training and clinical practices designed for those whose articulation is diagnosed as inferior; (3) an African American clinician's analysis of disability taxonomies applied to minority wards of the state of Illinois; and (4) an analysis of scapegoating at the national level in a class-action law suit regarding the 'missed' diagnosis of disability prior to birth. These overlapping cross-disability accounts seek to enact boundary crossings as the foundation for a new Chicago Model of interdisciplinary disability studies. The essay concludes with a discussion of the need to broaden disability coalitions as the terrain of political struggle becomes increasingly diverse and complex.

The Politics of Representing Disability

Asia Pacific Media Educator, 2015

Twenty-five years on from the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), media representation of people with disability has become even more significant. More recently, the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia has placed people with disability, and the issues they face, at the forefront of political discourse. This study looks at the media coverage of the ADA and the NDIS as significant social and political landmarks in their respective countries. Using content analysis, this article explores how media representations of people with disability are substantial factors within social reform, societal inclusion and equal rights. Because of numerous barriers to participation in many countries, people with disability may only be known to the larger society through media representations. Disability rights-focused news coverage is important to a society’s awareness of disability issues, so this research contributes to a better unde...

Understanding Disability: Biopsychology, Biopolitics, and an In-Between-All Politics

Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly, 2018

What do disability labels give us and what do they steal from us? How possible is it to live our lives without categories when life is necessarily categorical? In this brief provocation, I want to explore the disability labels through recourse to three perspectives that have much to say about categorization, disability, and the human condition: the biopsychological, the biopolitical, and, what I term, an in-between-all politics. It is my view that disability categories intervene in the world in some complex and often contradictory ways. One way of living with contradictions is to work across disciplinary boundaries, thus situating ourselves across divides and embracing uncertainty and contradiction to enhance all our lives. I will conclude with some interdisciplinary thoughts for the field of adapted physical activity.

Disability Politics & Theory, by A. J. Withers

Disability and anti-poverty activist A. J. Withers' recent book, Disability Politics & Theory, is an open denunciation of what Withers call the "medical-industrial complex," which includes "doctors, medical researchers, pharmaceutical corporations, insurance corporations, hospitals and others involved in the medical industry" (31). This book rejects the medical model of disability, in favour of what Withers call the radical model: an inclusive recognition of a community based on solidarity and openness. (Instead of working on assumptions and in respect

2.3 Radical disabilitY Politics

Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, 2019

Aj Withers and I edited a provocative round table on disability politics in the Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics edited by Ruth Kinna and Uri Gordon. Authors: Lydia X. Z. Brown, Loree Erickson, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, TL Lewis, Lateef McLeod and Mia Mingus.

(DIS)LABELED: A Critique of the 'Disability' Discourse

How do social preconceptions develop, particularly when they are concerned with ‘disability?’ Democratic, industrial societies that most often embody tenets of Western capitalism play a dominant role in shaping global ideologies; consequently, the ways in which these societies construct meaning about ‘disability’ communities directly inform broader international opinions. The research presented in this thesis explores the culturally constructed stigma ascribed to the concept of intellectual ‘disability,’ considering in particular how an imbalance between power and knowledge can sway social relationships. Ultimately, those who hold power in the social world have far more resources that can be employed to control the dissemination of knowledge, which can obscure the perception of ‘disability’ as an identity category. This thesis asks: Why has stigma towards ‘disability’ communities emerged in dominant social and political thought, and how are these preconceptions reproduced? This question is answered in three stages: firstly, through a sociohistorical investigation of how cognitive deviations from the established norm have been managed by societies in the past; secondly, through a theoretical exploration of the systems of organization aggravating social inequalities; and lastly, through the evaluation of a sociolinguistic framework that both overtly and covertly reproduces an assumption of absolute difference between ability and disability. Ultimately, the research will demonstrate how social, cultural, and political barriers are far more disabling to individuals with intellectual exceptions than their biological realities.

The experience of disability activism through the development of the disability movement: how do disabled activists find their way in politics?

Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 2009

This paper reflects critically upon part of the findings of research about key activists' experience of disability politics in Cyprus from 1966 to 2004. Disabled activists' experience of politics is conceptualized through a critical analysis of the different stages they went through while struggling to develop the disability movement in the given social, cultural, political and historical context. Having located this research in the theoretical sphere of feminism and postmodernism I have developed a model to illustrate the strength of feminism and postmodernism in understanding disability, the contribution of feminism in explaining disability politics and the limitations of postmodernism in guiding powerful disability politics. Finally, I use this model to reflect critically on the need for theory to guide disability activism.

Disability as diversity: A new biopolitics

We're a medical anthropologist and a literary critic, and while our research interests seemingly have little overlap, we found ourselves engaged in a series of conversations about how the language of diversity shapes representations of disability and reproductive politics, and how this representation stems from the biopolitical management of life in the twenty-first century. In the short essay that follows, we'll reflect on the ways that diversity discourses have become an organizing concept for some disability and deaf scholars and activists. We'll show how in conversations about prenatal testing for disability, in political claims made about the value of deafness and disability in international arenas, and in popular media representations of deafness and disability, deafness and disability are often (re)presented as forms of diversity. In particular, we're interested in the ways that a focus on disability or deafness as diversity works to erase difference, or to present difference as easily surmountable through a rhetoric that erases the actual difficult work of what Wendy Brown has called, " making a world with others. " [1] Sociologists and critical race and feminist theorists, among others, have long critiqued diversity as a tool in neoliberal political economies that works to promote the status quo through " feel good " politics (see, for example, Ahmed 2012; Brown 1995; Faist 2009; Vertovec 2012); we'd like to extend this critique to look at how appeals to diversity are employed in disability discourses. We believe that this move from disability to diversity functions as a form of biopolitics because it works simultaneously to enable and obscure the means by which the state manages life in an increasingly neoliberal world. If biopolitics is a mechanism for categorizing, optimizing, and governing life on both an individual and population level, the category of diversity provides a powerful means for such governance. Through this process of population level identification, diversity comes to replace other (individual) categories of differentiation such as disability and deafness. Instead of seeing herself as an individual " deaf " person for example, a person will see herself as a member of a diverse global/human/national/[substitute your category here] body. In this framework individuals are paradoxically expected to contribute to such diversity by channeling any marker that signifies them as different towards the production of diversity. It's through this performance of (and identification with and through) diversity that categories that mark