Critical disability studies

Dan Goodley

Rebecca Lawthom

Kirsty Liddiard

Katherine Runswick Cole

pp. 491-505

in: Brendan Gough (ed), The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This is a chapter concerned with disability politics, interested in the possible offerings of critical psychology and engaged with a project questioning what it means to be a human being. When disability is defined as a problem and when that problem is located in an individual's body or mind, then there is only really one way we can go with disability and that is pathologisation. We know from our critical psychology colleagues—many of who are represented in this volume of work—that a discipline that individualises human diversity as human trouble will only ever exist as an antithetical community to that of disability activism. The latter, a community in which we locate ourselves, seeks not only to challenge pathologising accounts of disability but also to open up a discussion about the possibilities for human capital offered by disability.