Disability studies is an academic discipline that emerged in the 1980s from the disability civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund [DREDF], 2011; Kudlick, 2003). Led by disabled people, activists worked to fight discrimination, segregation, and forced institutionalization by challenging the dominant social narrative that disability is a tragedy or a medical diagnosis best handled by “experts” (American Masters PBS, 2024; Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund [DREDF], 2011). Disability studies is interdisciplinary and uses a social model of disability (rather than a medical model) to examine how the world we live in produces disability.

From this perspective, disability is not an individual problem located in someone’s body or brain that needs to be “cured” or fixed, but something produced by the ableist world we have created (Davis, 1999; Linton & Berube, 1998). “Disability scholars have begun to insist that strong constructionism … fails to account for the difficult physical realities faced by people with disabilities” (Siebers, 2001). It is perhaps most accurate then, to conclude that people are disabled not by their physical or emotional impairments alone, but by inaccessible environments and discriminatory social attitudes.

For example:

• Stairs disable wheelchair users
• Inflexible work schedules disable people with chronic illness
• A lack of financial and social support disables mothers, particularly those caring for disabled family members

Why It Matters

“One need not identify oneself as disabled in order to reap the benefits of this up-and-coming field” (Kudlick, 2003).

Disability studies shows how disability is not merely an individual trait, but a broad, systemic problem that is leveraged by people and institutions in power to generate and sustain oppression (Davis, 1999). Disability, in this sense, is a social design. It has been used across time to justify exclusion from employment, education, citizenship, and motherhood; it does not exist in isolation from race, gender, sexuality, or class (Baynton, 2005; Davis, 1999; Kudlick, 2003).

The field challenges deeply rooted narratives and assumptions about human value and pushes us to reconsider what, and who is considered “normal” (Linton & Berube, 1998). Western cultural ideas about independence, productivity, conformity, intelligence, health, and wellness often operate as silent measures of worth. Disability studies resists these standards by emphasizing that physical and cognitive ability should not function as the default metric for dignity, agency, citizenship, or humanity (Garland‑Thomson, 2005; Siebers, 2001).

“Disability sheds light on such feminist concerns as the politics of appearance, the ethics of selective abortion and genetic testing, the relation between femininity and embodiment, the commercialization of health and fitness, issues of caretaking and caregiving, the surgical normalization of bodies, the ideology of normalcy, reproductive rights and responsibilities, the stigmatizing of age, and the politics of access and inclusion” (Garland-Thomas, 2005).