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Disability
- Authors:
- BARNES Colin, MERCER Geof
- Publisher:
- Polity
- Publication year:
- 2003
- Pagination:
- 186p.,bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- Cambridge
This book provides an introduction to current social science debates on disability. It chronicles how disabled people and their organizations have challenged the conventional, individualistic and medical explanations for disabled people's individual and collective disadvantage. This is an approach that is, as yet, not fully explored by mainstream sociology and social policy. The authors draw on a burgeoning ‘disability studies' literature from around the world, and from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, highlighting disabled peoples' exclusion and marginalization in key areas of social activity and participation across different historical and cultural contexts. These include family life and reproduction, education, employment, leisure, cultural imagery and politics. The analysis concentrates on disability as a distinctive form of social oppression similar to that experienced by women, minority ethnic and ‘racial' groups, and lesbians and gay men. Issues addressed include: theorising disability; historical and comparative perspectives; experiencing impairment and disability; professional and policy intervention in the lives of disabled people; disability politics, social policy and citizenship; and disability culture.The authors offer a wide-ranging critique of established academic, policy and professional orthodoxies. The continuing theme is how the new ways of approaching disability can inform and be informed by sociological and policy analysis and research.
The paradox of disability culture: the need to combine versus the imperative to let go
- Author:
- GAVIN Rose
- Journal article citation:
- Disability and Society, 18(5), August 2003, pp.675-690.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
This article seeks to demonstrate that, to function as a truly emancipatory phenomenon, disability culture must be relieved of the paradox that keeps it trapped in modernist assumptions that serve to reinforce its marginalised status. The paradox of disability culture may be stated as follows. How can disabled people claim unity without falling into the same exclusionary practices that have served to create their divisive identifications in the first place? Conversely, how can they relinquish the practices of identification that are based on binary oppositions without losing the ability to claim identities at all? The author argues that, by extricating it from its origins in essentialist assumptions, disability culture can be reinvigorated as a truly emancipatory device, which is capable of devising positive identities which, rather than celebrating the 'disabled identity', rely on its dissolution.
Disability and the notion of human development: questions of rights and capabilities
- Author:
- BAYLIES Carolyn
- Journal article citation:
- Disability and Society, 17(7), December 2002, pp.725-739.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
From a rights perspective disability has come increasingly to be seen as less a matter of personal misfortune than of societal neglect and obstruction, and as much warranting claims on the state to ensure inclusion and equality as to prosecute a duty of care. This shift resonates with other transitions within international discourse, most notably the increasing prominence of the notion of human development, which emphasises the importance of equity, freedom, and full realisation of human rights and capabilities. The capabilities approach, upon which the concept of human development is grounded, is examined more closely and its implications for disability considered. It is argued that a capabilities approach may serve alternatively to keep disability partially hidden from view or become a powerful means for identifying the responsibilities of governments and external agencies in genuinely equalising opportunities.
Controversial issues in a disabling society
- Authors:
- SWAIN John, FRENCH Sally, CAMERON Colin
- Publisher:
- Open University Press
- Publication year:
- 2003
- Pagination:
- 198p.,bibliog.
- Place of publication:
- Buckingham
Examines the consequences of the social model of disability. From this point of view society is itself at fault, that is a disabling society that is geared to, built for and by, and controlled by non-disabled people. This exclusion of disabled people is created and constructed in every aspect of living including language, thinking, the built environment and power structures and regulations. This model asserts that whether one is disabled or not, one lives within a 'disabling society'.