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Hannah Morgan, Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 43, Issue 2, March 2013, Pages 411–413, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bct018
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Extract
The proliferation of disabled people's user-led organisations in a frequently inhospitable environment can be seen as ‘an indicator that the disability movement has come of age’ (Harris and Roulstone, 2011, p. 119). Similarly, the diverse, often contentious and sometimes even playful nature of disability studies theorising provides very real evidence of the health and vibrancy of this field of interdisciplinary study and activism. In relation to social work, disability studies, its knowledge and theorising, provide the bedrock for reflexive, critically engaged practice with disabled people, their families, allies and organisations.
The book is divided into four sections—Cultures, Bodies, Subjectivities, and Communities—preceded by an introductory chapter by the editors. The introduction confronts head on the charge that theorising can be viewed as ‘extravagant flights of fancy’ (Barnes and Mercer, 2003, p. 2), particularly at a time of considerable material hardship for many disabled people. The editors locate their collection in the traditions of British disability studies that firmly grounded it in (at that time materialist) theory as way of understanding and thereby challenging the disablism encountered by disabled people and their families. Indeed, it is pertinent that the book is dedicated to the memory of Vic Finkelstein, a pioneer of the disabled people's movement, of disability studies and of a social theory of disability that challenged individualised understandings that viewed disablement as a personal tragedy (Roulstone, 2011). While, as they acknowledge, Vic ‘may have disagreed with some arguments in this text’ (p. v), he would share their position that ‘when social theory works at its best it demands us to reconsider the assumptions, discourses and taken-for-granted ideologies that underpin the exclusion of some people and the accentuation of the social roles of others’ (p. 2). Finkelstein and the other founders of the British disabled people's movement who united in the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation (UPIAS) were clear that such theorising was a necessary pre-requisite for the more practical social model of disability and thereby significant social change.
