An Ethical Agenda in Disability Research: rhetoric or reality?

Inspired by the writings of disabled activists and scholars in the 1980s and 90s the emancipatory turn in social research has had a particularly important influence on disability researchers in the UK. The emergent critique of conventional wisdom and ways of theorising disability was extended to mainstream social research. The shift from explaining disability solely in terms of individual pathology to the ways in which environmental and cultural barriers effectively exclude people with accredited impairments from every day life was especially influential. Indeed, this socio-political, or social model of disability, approach has stimulated the adoption of a more justifiable emancipatory research paradigm that draws explicitly upon disabled people’s collective experience and so challenges directly the widespread social oppression of disabled people.