Towards a contextual psychology of disablism

Brian Watermeyer

"In recent years, disability studies has been driven by a social model of disability, focusing on the social and economic oppression of disabled people. Although an important counterbalance to a pathologising medical model, the social model risks presenting an impoverishing and disembodied view of disability, one that ignores the psychological nature of oppression and its effects.This innovative work argues that a psychological framework of disability is an essential part of developing a more cohesive disability movement and develops bi-directional conceptual links between culture and disabled subjectivity through the mechanisms of lifelong socialization. It is designed to explore individual psychological experience, whilst retaining a rigorous critique of social forces of oppression; and to avoid the pathologisation of disadvantaged individuals, whilst exploring the psychological...