Knowra Disability studies Disability studies Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines disability as an embodied and socially shaped phenomenon, including how institutions, cultures, and environments create barriers and define normality.
Social model of disability : A framework that locates disability in social barriers and exclusion rather than solely in individual impairment. This framework anchors the field’s analysis of how environments and institutions disable people.
Disability rights movement : A political movement seeking equal rights, access, and social inclusion for disabled people. Activists’ demands helped shape disability studies’ questions and challenged research conducted without disabled people’s participation.
Universal design : An approach to designing environments and products usable by people with a wide range of abilities. It translates analysis of exclusion into design principles that reduce barriers from the outset.
Biopsychosocial model : A framework explaining health and disability through interacting biological, psychological, and social factors. It offers a synthesis that differs from accounts emphasizing either bodily conditions or social barriers alone.
Medical model of disability : A framework that treats disability primarily as an individual condition requiring diagnosis, treatment, or rehabilitation. It contrasts with social accounts by locating the main problem within an individual body.
Independent living movement : A disability-led movement advocating personal autonomy, community-based support, and control over services. Its organizing challenged institutional care and established independent living as a political, not merely personal, issue.
Reasonable accommodation : A modification that enables a disabled person to access work, education, services, or other activities, subject to legal limits. It shows how disability analysis informs practical duties to alter otherwise exclusionary arrangements.
International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health : A World Health Organization framework describing functioning and disability in relation to health conditions and contextual factors. Its classification approach brings institutional measurement into tension with disability studies’ critiques of categorization.
Impairment : A bodily or cognitive difference, limitation, or loss, distinguished in some frameworks from socially produced disability. The distinction helps explain how bodily conditions and social barriers interact without collapsing into one another.
Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation : A British disability rights organization founded in 1972 that advanced an influential social analysis of disability. Its writings helped articulate the distinction between impairment and disabling social arrangements.
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