Disability studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary academic field focusing on the roles of people with disabilities in history, literature, social policy, law, architecture, and other disciplines. Although it has many antecedents, disability studies began to flourish toward the end of the twentieth century. The first PhD program in disability studies in the United States was established in 1998 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[1]
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Disability theorists have debated at length how disability should be defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability.[2]
The field of academic study of disability is growing worldwide; one of its major backers, the transnational Society for Disability Studies, took up the task in the mid-1990s to create an official "definition" for what the field involves. It offers the following working guidelines for any program that describes itself as 'Disability Studies':
- It should be interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary. Disability sits at the center of many overlapping disciplines in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Programs in Disability Studies should encourage a curriculum that allows students, activists, teachers, artists, practitioners, and researchers to engage the subject matter from various disciplinary perspectives.
- It should challenge the view of disability as an individual deficit or defect that can be remedied solely through medical intervention or rehabilitation by "experts" and other service providers. Rather, a program in disability studies should explore models and theories that examine social, political, cultural, and economic factors that define disability and help determine personal and collective responses to difference. At the same time, Disability Studies should work to de-stigmatize disease, illness, and impairment, including those that cannot be measured or explained by biological science. Finally, while acknowledging that medical research and intervention can be useful, Disability Studies should interrogate the connections between medical practice and stigmatizing disability.
- It should study national and international perspectives, policies, literature, culture, and history with an aim of placing current ideas of disability within their broadest possible context. Since attitudes toward disability have not been the same across times and places, much can be gained by learning from these other experiences.
- It should actively encourage participation by disabled students and faculty, and should ensure physical and intellectual access.
- It should make it a priority to have leadership positions held by disabled people; at the same time it is important to create an environment where contributions from anyone who shares the above goals are welcome.[3]
However, the actual scope of disability studies differs from country to country in spite of its common core. Some, such as the United Kingdom, tend to see the field primarily as primarily belonging only to disabled people and the disability activism they might tend to promote; in the United States, by contrast, a much wider range of professions, such as sociology and social work more generally, which involves both able-bodied and disabled people, may be involved. One of the earliest academic publications in the area was 'Deformity as Device in the Twentieth-Century Australian Novel' (1991),[4] a PhD thesis, at the University of Tasmania, by CA. Cranston.
Disability studies is not without its critics.[5] It has been suggested that the dominant social model it uses, which developed in the 1970s and served its purpose well through that era, has now been outgrown, and needs major developments. One major area of contention is the frequent exclusion of the personal experience of impairment, cognitive disability, and illness, which is often left out of most discussion in these circles in the name of "focused" academic discourse. Another concern is the ever-present possibility of a drift towards identity politics in the discipline and also within the disability rights movement as a whole. The social model of disability separates physical impairment from social disability, and in its most rigid form does not accept that impairment can cause disability at all. Scholars are increasingly recognizing that the effects of impairment form a central part of many disabled people's experience, and that these effects must be included for the social model to still be a valid reflection of that experience. Slogan "the personal is political" has been particularly influential in these developments.
Disability studies has also been criticised for its failure to engage with other forms of sociopolitical oppression, such as racism, sexism or homophobia, both as they may apply to disabled people in these oppressed groups, and also in disability studies' ability (or lack thereof) to "unite" with these other movements in common struggle. As a relatively new discipline, critics allege disability studies seems to have made very little progress in this area, in spite of new published writings which deal with these very topics.