PLAN DE COURS INTRODUCTION TO DISABILITY STUDIES

Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 2007

Canadian journal of sociology = Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 2000

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2010

Serious attempts are now being made to develop disability studies as an academic field in the Netherlands. On the one hand, the field will have to establish its place in the division of academic labor. On the other hand it will need to safeguard its relevance for, and connections with, the disability movement. How is this to be accomplished? The social model of disability offered an approach that, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, provided an integration of theoretical and sociopolitical objectives. But, in the first place this approach has not achieved the same purchase outside those countries, and in the second place it is currently subject to a variety of critiques. Drawing on insights from the social study of science, in this paper we argue that the social model should not be abandoned, but must rather be refined and extended to accommodate critique. Implications for the organization of the field of disability studies are discussed.

In France, as opposed to most European countries, the term ‘‘handicap’’ is not only used as a noun, but also as an attribute to designate people living with disabilities. Thus, it was of particular interest to understand the representations, the metaphors and the meanings related to the term ‘‘handicap’’. A qualitative study, using in-depth open-ended interviews was carried out in France. The material collected was analysed through a content analysis, in order to identify the metaphors and shed light on their underlying meanings. Our study has demonstrated that the representations of handicap do not reflect word for word the official classification separating the motor, sensorial, mental and social components of disabilities. In the representations, the various components are restructured in different configurations, which give specific meanings and values to each one in the context of a global representation of human social functioning and its avatars. ‘‘Mental handicap’’ appears to be the most handicapping of all disabilities and functions as metaphor for all the conditions, states, situations and persons designated by the term ‘‘handicap’’.

Disability Studies: A bibliography, 2022

Disability Studies: A Bibliography aims to extend the current discourses on disability by collating and consolidating the growing body of scholarship on the meanings and categories of disability from 2000 to 2021. This Bibliography is segmented into four parts- Theorizing Disability, Representing Disability, Intersectional Approaches and Rethinking Metanarratives. It is thematically arranged into 35 sections and contains entries from approximately 1100 seminal books and journal articles in Disability Studies that update and extend new knowledge around the discipline. All titles are in English and have been indexed using MLA 9th edition stylesheet.

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2016

Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2020

Disability studies is deeply connected with the disability rights movement, and some of the pioneers of the movement were disabled academics. It is an area of study that draws from different disciplines, especially the social sciences and the humanities, while having its own unique character. The insights gained from disability studies are embedded in the direct experiences of disabled people and their family members and are based on an understanding of disability as arising from the interaction between people with impairments and socially created material and cultural barriers. This understanding enables the study of disability through the different disciplines within the humanities, such as philosophy, history and literary studies. Disability studies unveils the complex nature of disability and the multifarious factors that create it and that impinge on the lived experience of disabled people. It also testifies to the many ways in which disabled people negotiate their lives and identities as disabled people. For this reason, disability studies has much to reveal about the human condition and can contribute to current and future developments in the humanities.

Disability studies, like all other fields dedicated to studying an oppression, addresses a simple problem that manifests as a complex social phenomenon. Disability studies at its purest is an emancipatory endeavour; its objective is to unshackle the impaired body from the socio-political oppression placed weightily on top of impairment, that which we call 'disability'. Disability, then, is not something embodied but something imparted to restrict, to imprison, and to demonise an atypical body. Therefore, disability is to impairment what sexism is to sex, and feminism's goal to emancipate women is largely analogous to disability studies' goal to emancipate the impaired. However, where the focus of feminism investigates the ways in which societal structures, norms and values are contradictory to female equality, disability studies has often looked to the impaired body as a square peg in a circular hole.