In this review, I concentrate on analysing the response Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs has awoken in the disability studies community. I argue that the complicated relationship between politics and science is the underlying cause for many controversies in disability studies. The research field should regain its autonomy and scrutinise properly its ontological premises.The field of disability studies in the UK is in turmoil. During the past 10 years or so, there have been several debates that have revolved around (...) the social model of disability. The latest source of a heated debate is Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs. Many of us working outside the UK have followed this debate with feelings ranging from amazement to disapproval, from amusement to sadness. The February 2007 issue of Disability & Society, the leading disability studies journal in Britain and also the persistent unofficial organ of the social model, includes a review symposium on Shakespeare’s book. It is nowadays rare to come across mischievous, ad hominem arguments in academic publications. However, one of the reviewers, Mike Oliver, a sociologist and the main architect of the social model, has no problem lashing Shakespeare by depicting him as “a relatively affluent person with a minor impairment who is never going to be at the sharp end of personal support services” and who thus writes “well intentioned but meaningless platitudes”.1 According to Oliver, the main reason for Shakespeare’s allegedly errant writings is the fact that his book draws heavily on philosophy, a discipline whose “only use is as a career opportunity for middle-class intellectuals who can’t get a proper job”.1Although the UK disability studies community produces, fortunately, a lot of ambitious work that respects the traditional criteria of good academic practice and research, the preceeding description gives some idea …. (shrink)

During recent decades various researchers from health and social sciences have been debating what it means for a person to be disabled. A rather overlooked approach has developed alongside this debate, primarily inspired by the philosophical tradition called phenomenology. This paper develops a phenomenological model of disability by arguing for a different methodological and conceptual framework from that used by the existing phenomenological approach. The existing approach is developed from the phenomenology of illness, but the paper illustrates how the case (...) of congenital disabilities, looking at the congenital disorder called cerebral palsy (CP), presents a fundamental problem for the approach. In order to understand such congenital cases as CP, the experience of disability is described as being gradually different from, rather than a disruption of, the experience of being abled, and it is argued that the experience of disability is complex and dynamically influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Different experiential aspects of disability— pre-reflective, attuned and reflective aspects—are described, demonstrating that the experience of disability comes in different degrees. Overall, this paper contributes to the debates about disability by further describing the personal aspects and experience of persons living with disabilities. (shrink)

The leading models of disability struggle to fully encompass all aspects of “disability.” This difficulty arises, the author argues, because the models fundamentally misunderstand the nature of disability. Current theoretical approaches to disability can be understood as “nounal,” in that they understand disability as a thing that is caused or embodied. In contrast, this paper presents an adverbial perspective on disability, which shows that disability is experienced as a personally irremediable impediment to daily-living tasks or goals-like-ours. The picture theory of (...) disability technically constitutes a species of relational approach because its analysis references the interplay between an individual and their environment; it differs from other relational accounts, however, by interpreting disability as a certain kind of negative experience—rather than a function of that relationship. This purely descriptive theory makes no normative claims about disability and operates as both a mechanism for the evaluation of the experience of disability and a heuristic device for the proper interpretation of disability. When disability is reframed in this way, the theory offers a particularist perspective which shows if, when, where, and how disability is experienced. (shrink)

This paper argues that the medical conception of health as absence of disease is a value-free theoretical notion. Its main elements are biological function and statistical normality, in contrast to various other ideas prominent in the literature on health. Apart from universal environmental injuries, diseases are internal states that depress a functional ability below species-typical levels. Health as freedom from disease is then statistical normality of function, i.e., the ability to perform all typical physiological functions with at least typical efficiency. (...) This conception of health is as value-free as statements of biological function. The view that health is essentially value-laden, held by most writers on the topic, seems to have one of two sources: an assumption that health judgments must be practical judgments about the treatment of patients, or a commitment to "positive" health beyond the absence of disease. I suggest that the assumption is mistaken, the commitment possibly misdescribed. (shrink)