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Disability Studies: Schools of Thought and Theoretical Trajectories

Disability studies has emerged over the last four decades as a critical interdisciplinary field concerned not only with disability as a social and cultural category but also with the epistemological, political, and affective frameworks through which “disability” is made intelligible. At its core, disability studies resists reducing disability to a medical diagnosis or an individual deficit, insisting instead on its social, political, and ontological dimensions. Within this broad terrain, several schools of thought have crystallized—sometimes converging, sometimes in tension.

1. The Medical Model

Often treated as the foil against which disability studies defines itself, the medical model conceives disability as an individual pathology or impairment to be treated, rehabilitated, or cured. Disability here is a problem located in the body or mind of the individual, with medicine and technology cast as the vehicles of normalization. Although rarely endorsed outright within disability studies, the medical model remains an important reference point, not only because it shapes healthcare, policy, and everyday perception, but also because critiques of it generated the conditions for the field’s birth.

2. The Social Model

Emerging in the UK in the 1970s through the activism of groups like the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), the social model drew a sharp line between impairment (a bodily condition) and disability (the social barriers that exclude and marginalize people with impairments). Here, disability is not inherent to the body but imposed by inaccessible environments, discriminatory policies, and stigmatizing attitudes. This model proved transformative, underpinning demands for civil rights, accessible infrastructure, and anti-discrimination law. Its conceptual clarity and political utility have made it foundational.

Yet critiques soon followed: some argue that the social model overly simplifies by maintaining the impairment/disability binary, neglecting the lived experience of embodiment, pain, or illness. Others note its Anglo-centric origins and its emphasis on structural barriers to the exclusion of affective, cultural, and intersectional dynamics.

3. The Minority Group Model

In the U.S., disability rights activists articulated a minority group model, drawing parallels between disability and other categories of social inequality such as race, gender, and sexuality. Here, disability is understood primarily as a locus of discrimination and exclusion. The model emphasizes legal remedies, anti-discrimination protections, and political recognition. It was central to the passage of landmark legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).

This approach, however, has been critiqued for framing disability too narrowly within liberal rights discourse, insufficiently attending to structural inequalities that cannot be solved by anti-discrimination law alone.

4. The Cultural Model

The cultural model foregrounds disability as a site of identity, community, and creativity. It shifts focus from barriers and discrimination to meaning-making: how disability circulates in literature, art, film, and popular culture; how disabled people generate counter-narratives, aesthetics, and modes of embodiment that challenge normative ideals. Disability culture, in this sense, is not merely resistance but also invention: a way of inhabiting the world otherwise.

5. Feminist and Queer Interventions

From the 1990s onward, feminist and queer theorists intervened in disability studies, interrogating its reliance on stable categories and binaries. Feminist disability studies has emphasized the gendered dimensions of disability—such as reproductive rights, caregiving, and the medicalization of women’s bodies—while also highlighting intersections with race and class. Queer disability studies has interrogated normative assumptions about bodily integrity, productivity, and sexuality, framing disability as a site of resistance to heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. These approaches resist the temptation to render disability coherent, instead underscoring its instability and multiplicity.

6. Critical Disability Studies and Post-Structuralist Turns

Critical disability studies emerged as an umbrella term for approaches influenced by post-structuralism, phenomenology, and critical theory. Thinkers like Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder have pushed beyond the social model by theorizing normalcy itself as a historical construction; by analyzing staring, enfreakment, and other cultural practices; and by examining how disability is narratively and discursively produced. This turn destabilizes disability as a stable category, seeing it instead as contingent, relational, and embedded in broader regimes of power/knowledge.

7. Global and Decolonial Disability Studies

A more recent school foregrounds the uneven global geographies of disability. Disability is not experienced, defined, or politicized in the same way across contexts. Decolonial approaches interrogate the exportation of Western models of disability into the Global South, where colonial histories, religious frameworks, and economic conditions produce different meanings and practices. This line of thought asks: How can disability studies avoid universalizing? What would a pluriversal disability studies look like—one attentive to situated knowledges and local epistemologies?

8. Disability Justice

While disability rights movements focused on access and legal equality, disability justice—articulated by groups like Sins Invalid and scholars such as Patty Berne—pushes further. Emerging in the 2000s, disability justice insists on intersectionality, centering queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color with disabilities. It critiques the white, middle-class orientation of mainstream disability rights, and frames disability not only as an issue of accessibility but also as bound up with racism, colonialism, capitalism, and environmental injustice. Disability justice emphasizes interdependence, collective liberation, and transformative politics, expanding the field beyond accommodation toward systemic change.

9. Global and Decolonial Approaches

Decolonial disability studies reminds us that Western models cannot be universalized. Disability takes shape through religious cosmologies, colonial histories, economic infrastructures, and kinship systems that differ across contexts. Scholars in this vein press for a pluriversal disability studies attentive to multiple epistemologies and situated practices.

10. The Affective and Material Turns

Finally, recent work draws on affect theory, new materialisms, and crip theory to explore vulnerability, interdependence, and temporality. Alison Kafer’s notion of crip time reframes disability as a temporal reorientation; Eli Clare’s writing highlights disability as a way of knowing place and body; Jasbir Puar critiques the incorporation of some disabled subjects into neoliberal multiculturalism while others are abandoned to debility. These approaches emphasize entanglement: disability is not lack, but a mode of being-in-relation.

Conclusion

Disability studies today is less a unified field than a constellation of approaches, each with distinct emphases: some strategic and activist, others critical and deconstructive; some rooted in rights-based frameworks, others in cultural production or affective life. The field’s dynamism lies precisely in these tensions. Disability studies has never been only about disability—it is about how societies define the human, how they distribute vulnerability and value, and how they imagine futures that exceed the cruel optimism of normalcy.

The Charity Model of Disability

The charity model understands disability primarily as a source of suffering, misfortune, or tragedy that calls for benevolence and pity. In this framework, disabled people are cast as passive recipients of care, donations, and goodwill, while nondisabled people are positioned as benefactors. Disability is thus depoliticized: a matter of individual need rather than structural inequality.

Historically, the charity model dominated Western responses to disability. Religious institutions, philanthropic organizations, and charitable appeals provided shelter, asylums, and basic subsistence. While such interventions often alleviated immediate hardship, they also reinforced dependency and paternalism. Disabled people were rarely consulted about their own lives or granted agency in shaping policy; instead, their existence was mobilized to inspire generosity in others.

The model remains visible today in media appeals, telethons, and fundraising campaigns that rely on sentimental portrayals of disabled children or “overcoming” narratives. These depictions can elicit sympathy and donations, but they also reproduce ableist stereotypes: the “tragic cripple,” the “heroic inspiration,” or the “burden” requiring rescue. Such imagery diverts attention from systemic barriers—such as inaccessible housing, discriminatory employment practices, or underfunded healthcare—by framing disability as an individual predicament solvable through charity rather than rights or justice.

Disability studies scholars and activists have critiqued the charity model for several reasons:

Disempowerment: It positions disabled people as dependent and voiceless, rather than as rights-bearing citizens.
Depoliticization: It obscures structural issues (ableism, policy failures, economic exclusion) by individualizing disability.
Representation: It circulates pity-based images that reinforce stigma and “othering.”
Gatekeeping: Charitable organizations often claim authority to speak for disabled people, sidelining self-advocacy.

In contrast, the social model and later frameworks emphasize that what disables people are inaccessible environments and discriminatory systems, not their impairments alone. The disability justice movement goes further, insisting that charity-based approaches perpetuate inequality by sustaining hierarchies of giver and receiver, rather than dismantling the conditions that necessitate such giving.

Still, the charity model persists, partly because it resonates with cultural traditions of benevolence and because it offers an emotionally gratifying role for nondisabled people. Disability studies challenges this model not by rejecting care, but by reframing it: from paternalistic giving to collective responsibility, interdependence, and justice.