Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity: Interregnum or Productive Interruption?

• In Event: Tracing the Bold Lines Drawn by Steven J. Taylor

Abstract

• Scholarly or scientific significance


Disability studies and interdisciplinarity:
interregnum or productive interruption?

This paper considers the positioning of disability studies, by its own exponents and others, as a discipline in its own right and relation to other disciplines. It draws on Taylor’s (2006) historical analysis of the development of disability studies and disability studies in education, which demonstrates how the early critiques of labelling, stigmatization and the medicalization of deviance has formed the basis of what we know as disability studies today. Taylor’s ethnographic analysis of a family’s encounters with disability, an exemplar of disability studies, is also examined. This recounts a family’s success in eluding stigmatizing and pathologising constructions of them, through their own immediate and extended networks and through their avoidance of the more austere institutions and facilities ‘that engulf people in a separate subculture’ (Taylor, 2000, p. 87). This plausible counter-narrative to those that ‘dehumanize’ (Bogdan & Taylor, 1989, p. 146) and lead to an ‘underdevelopment of … consciousness’ (Zola, 2003, p. 243) underlines the potency and potential of disability studies.
Overview and Scholarly or scientific significance of the presentation

The paper offers some international comparisons of the developments and tensions within disability studies, some of which have arisen from the diverse perspectives and theoretical orientations that comprise it (Taylor, 2006). It explores in detail questions of voice and power that have arisen through efforts to articulate and position disability studies as a distinctive field and in relation to other disciplines. It also considers the boundary work undertaken on behalf of disability studies and the consequences of some of its more policing-oriented manifestations. The extent to which disability studies has functioned as an inter-regnum, marking a gap between disciplines, or a more productive form of interruption, which forces an interrogation of particular disciplines, is examined.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the prospects and possibilities of disability studies becoming the ‘default paradigm’ (Ware and Valle, 2009, p. 113) and the implications of this for the scholars who choose to engage with and within it. In particular, questions are raised about the civic responsibilities of academics for ‘pricking the consciousness of the public’ (Zola, 2003, p. 10) and about the potential risks for early careers scholars entering this particularly charged part of the academy.

Author

• Julie E. Allan, The University of Birmingham