Disability Studies

Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability," where impairment was an impairment of an individual's mind or body, while disability was considered a social construct. This premise gave rise to two distinct models of disability: the social and medical models of disability. In 1999 the social model was universally accepted as the model preferred by the field. However, in recent years, the division between the social and medical models has been challenged. Additionally, there has been an increased focus on interdisciplinary research. For example, recent investigations suggest using "cross-sectional markers of stratification" may help provide new insights on the non-random distribution of risk factors capable of acerbating disablement processes.

Disability studies courses include work in disability history, theory, legislation, policy, ethics, and the arts. However, students are taught to focus on the lived experiences of individuals with disabilities in practical terms. The field is focused on increasing individuals with disabilities access to civil rights and improving their quality of life.

Disability studies emerged in the 1980s primarily in the US, the UK, and Canada. In 1986, the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability of the Social Science Association (United States) was renamed the Society for Disability Studies. The first US disabilities studies program emerged in 1994 at Syracuse University. The first edition of the Disabilities Studies Reader (one of the first collections of academic papers related to disability studies) was published in 1997. The field grew rapidly over the next ten years. In 2005, the Modern Language Association established disability studies as a "division of study".

While Disability Studies primarily emerged in the US, the UK, and Canada, disability studies were also conducted in other countries through different lens. For instance, Germany looks at Queer Disability Studies since the beginning of the early 20th century. The Disability Studies in Germany are influenced by the written literary works of feminist sexologist who study how being disabled affects one's sexuality and ability to feel pleasure. In Norway, Disability Studies are focused in the literary context.

A variation emerged in 2017 with the first Accessibility Studies program at Central Washington University with an interdisciplinary focus on social justice, universal design, and international Web Accessibility Guidelines (WAG3) as a general education knowledge base.

History

Universities have long studied disabilities from a clinical perspective. In 1986, the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability of Social Science Association was renamed the Society for Disability Studies and its journal ''Disability Studies Quarterly'' was the first journal in disability studies. The first US disabilities studies program emerged in 1994 at Syracuse University. However, courses and programs were very few. In the 1997 first edition of the ''Disability Studies Reader'', Lennard J. Davis wrote that "it had been virtually impossible to have someone teaching about disability within the humanities". In the second edition, written ten years later, he writes that "all that has changed", but "just because disability studies is on the map, does not mean that is easy to find".

Still the field continued to grow throughout the 2000s. In 2009 ''Disability Studies Quarterly'' published ''A Multinational Review of English-language Disability Studies Degrees and Courses''. They found that from 2003 to 2008 the number of disability studies stand-alone studies programs in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada grew from 56 to 108 and the number of degree-granting programs grew from 212 to 420. A total of 17 degrees in disability studies were offered, with 11 programs in the US, 2 in the UK, 3 in Canada, and 1 in Australia.

The 2014 article "Disability Studies: A New Normal" in ''The New York Times'' suggests that the expansion in disability studies programs is related to the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Those raised after the passage of the ADA have entered colleges and the workforce, as Disability Studies has grown. In a 2014 article, ''Disability Studies Quarterly'' published an analysis on the relationships between student run groups and disability studies, from 2008 to 2012. Their article analyzes groups at four different universities and describes how professors have incorporated student activism into their curriculum and research.

Definitions

According to the transnational Society for Disability Studies:

Disability studies and medical humanities

The social model of disability is expanded to chronic illness and to the broader work of the medical humanities. Practitioners are working towards improving the healthcare for disabled people through disability studies. This multi-disciplinary field of inquiry draws on the experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities to address discrimination. Infinite Ability has done some preliminary work in India to introduce disability studies to medical students. The medical humanities movement advocates use of literature in exploring illness, from practitioner and patient perspectives, with graphic medicine as an emerging strategy that combines comics-style medium and illness narrative.

Intersectionality

Feminism introduces the inclusion of intersectionality in disability studies. It focuses on race, gender, sexuality, class and other related systems of oppression that can also intersect with having a disability. From a feminist standpoint, there is a large concern for grasping multiple positions and differences among social groups. Some research on intersectionality and disability has focused on the aspect of being part of two or more stigmatized groups and how these are contributing factors to multiple forms of harassment, the paradox known as "Double Jeopardy".

In academic settings and practices such as Gender or Women's Studies the course work does not always highlight ideals of intersectionality and identity. But Sri Craven highlights the fact that in academia students and professors don't look at history in a culmination of the intersecting identities but rather focus in one perspective. Craven and his colleagues include identities such as disability both mental and physical in an alternative course description to get students and faculty to think about identity, oppression and struggle in a new way.

Race

Recent scholarship has included studies that explore the intersection between disability and race. Christopher Bell's work publicly challenged disability studies to engage with race, calling it "white disability studies". His posthumous volume on ''Blackness and Disability'' further developed his analysis. These works engage with issues of neoliberal economic oppression. The 2009 publication of Fiona Kumari Campbell's ''Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness'' signaled a new direction of research — studies in ableism, moving beyond preoccupations with disability to explore the maintenance of abledness in sexed, raced and modified bodies. A. J. Withers' work critiques the social model of disability because, among other things, it erases the experiences of BIPOC people, women, trans and queer people and puts forward a more radical model of disability. Similarly, recent work has focused on the intersections of race and ethnicity with disability in the field of education studies and has attempted to bridge Critical Race Studies with disability studies. Other contemporary works, such as literary studies conducted by critic Sami Schalk explore the intersection of disability and race and the use of dis/ability as a metaphor within the genre of black women's speculative fiction. Collectively, these works reflect an effort to deal with complex histories of marking racially "othered" bodies as physically, psychologically, or morally deficient, and traces this history of scientific racism to contemporary dynamics. Empirical studies show that minority students are disproportionately more likely to be removed from class or school for "behavioral" or academic reasons, and far more likely to be labeled with intellectual or learning disabilities. The authors propose a union of critical race and disability studies, DisCrit, as an intersectional approach designed to analyzing the interaction between ableism, sexism, and racism.

In addition to work by individual scholars, disability studies organizations have also begun to focus on disability and race and gender. The Society for Disability Studies created the Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship to honor Bell's commitment to diversity in disability studies. Postsecondary disability studies programs increasingly engage with the intersectionality of oppression. The University of Manitoba

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