Disability and Critical Sociology: Expanding the Boundaries of Critical Social Inquiry

Disability in the 21st century constitutes a legitimate and growing area of study in the academy. Interdisciplinary by nature, the origins of disability studies can be traced directly to social movements of disabled people organizing to define disability as a social rather than a medical problem. In the US, disabled sociologists such as Irv Zola, a leader in the American Sociology Association, were key figures in the field’s formative years. In Britain, sociologists such as Mike Oliver (1990) and Colin Barnes, both founding members of the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP) used the social model to bridge the divide between disability studies and sociology (Barnes et al., 1999). Disability studies is now a growth area in the social sciences, the humanities and a host of other disciplines operating across the North/South divide.

An edition of Critical Sociology devoted to the concept of disability is overdue. Disability Studies owes much to Critical Theory. Many scholars accept that the social relations of disability are embedded within an oppressive and discriminatory society, the most obvious links being a championing of the concept of emancipatory research derived from Habermas’s distinction between knowledge constituent interests (rational, interpretive and critical), and an emphasis on historical materialism. In its early stages, disability studies remained mired in boundary defining and boundary guarding and a rather simplistic dichotomizing between what emerged as the social model to contest the hegemony of the medicine and allied professions. As Corker (1999) suggested, this strict dichotomy and a policing of the boundaries by some key social model disability theorists constituted a barrier to the development of innovative and transformative disability theory within an expanded critical theoretical frame. Thus, despite drawing part of its initial modus operandi from critical theory, disability studies was not unable to make much headway in contributing to the agenda of the larger discipline. However, recent conceptual work under the broader rubric of Critical Disability Studies (e.g. Gabel and Peters, 2004; Hughes, 2007, 2009; McRuer 2006; Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009; Shildrick, 2009) has added renewed impetus for a sustained dialogue with Critical Sociology on the strictures that currently restrain theoretical development. This kind of mutual critique can provide a powerful analysis of disability and suggest alternatives to the cultural formations and social structures that while affecting all in late-modernity often have a disproportionate effect on disabled people. Capitalism, imperialism and neoliberalism have given rise to a range of political, social and economic processes that have radically altered social and public policy in a multiplicity of ways, and result in adverse impacts on disabled people. Examples of state and global power impacting on the lives of disabled people will be particularly interrogated in this edition.

This brings us to the present historical moment. As two of us have argued in a recent paper (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009), the ascendance of Critical Disability Studies within the past decade is not a movement away from an emancipatory focus but a rethinking of the marginalization of disabled people and an opening up of the field to a diversity of critical social and cultural theorizing. It is thus entirely appropriate that this embracing of the current critical theoretical landscape be presented in the pages of Critical Sociology. It is our hope that critical sociologists who heretofore had not seen the potential of disability to illuminate longstanding conceptual concerns within their discipline will find the papers in this edition engaging and of relevance to the forces and processes at work within late modernity.

As a heuristic frame for this issue, we employ C. Wright Mills’s concept of the Sociological Imagination. This notion has inspired many critical sociologists over the years and has been recently revisited as a central theoretical frame to critically review the relationship between late-modernity, capitalism and neoliberalism (see Burawoy, 2007). While Mills’s perspective has certain prejudices that were emblematic of sociology in the middle of the 20th century (see Shuttleworth and Meekosha, this issue), we think his imperative toward a social justice oriented sociology was ahead of its time and still serves the discipline well as an inspirational call to do critical sociology that draws public attention to the myriad private troubles of peoples. Thus, it continues to have salience in late modernity. The authors included in this edition of Critical Sociology were encouraged to reflect on Mills’s notion of the sociological imagination and to either dialogue with it in their papers or to take it as the starting point of their analyses. Several papers thus make direct reference to this idea, while for others it implicitly informs their approaches.

Although the theme of the sociological imagination is consistent with our view that sociological thinking on disability needs to be re-imagined, we do not adhere to a totally unfettered critical imagination. Following Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009), we maintain that a responsible critique must remain cognizant of four tenets of critical social theory in the late-modern context: (1) the irreducibility of the social to empirically derived ‘facts’; (2) the necessity to link theory with praxis; (3) a reflexive awareness of the historical development of our own thinking; and (4) an openness to and dialogical engagement with ideas emerging from diverse cultures. A radical critique entails responsibility and if need be ‘self-limitation’ to ‘regulate’ inherent limitations (Castoriadis, 1990: 128, cited in Rockhill, 2011: xii; Castoriadis, 1993: 17–18). We are also wary of academic elitism and a quasi-religious belief that the holy grail of critical thinking has been found. The resultant dogmatism can be just as intellectually and creatively stultifying as the attendance to strict forms of ‘evidence’, as in the vernacular of neoliberal corporate academia. We argue that this collection of articles manages to steer a conceptual course between the twin dangers of groundlessness and dogmatism. They open up modes of critical thinking on disability that are reflexive, creative but grounded, and not self-absorbed with their own historically contingent methodological and theoretical understandings. A critical sociology of disability needs to contextualize the disability experience from a position of transformative change for this highly marginalized and disadvantaged group.

The papers included in this edition are a collective effort to critically position the study of disability, which remains a relatively new and emerging scholarship, within the field of critical sociology. While the scope of the papers may initially appear broad due to the varying landscapes in which they traverse, conceptually, theoretically and methodologically, they are bridged by their efforts to distil the relevance of critical sociological inquiry for the study of disability and, conversely, reveal the significance of disability to expanding the existing boundaries in critical sociological thought that have been, and continue to be, structured around an able-bodied frame. Thus, all of the papers navigate key theoretical dimensions, yet through positioning disability as the central lens radically expand the theoretical frame of critical sociology whilst also illuminating points of contention, contestation and limitations.

Shuttleworth and Meekosha’s paper draws inspiration from C. Wright Mills’s notion of the sociological imagination but are highly critical of sociology for marginalizing disability in the discipline. They argue that the sociological imaginary has for the most part tended toward a deterministic understanding of the concept of disability. The authors’ critique also targets those sociologies that have attempted to particularly include disability in their purview (e.g. medical sociology, sociology of health and illness, sociology of the body), as perpetuating a medicalized view of disability and/or limiting disabled people’s agency through the employment of notions such as ‘vulnerability’. On the other hand, the authors also critique attempts by disability studies scholars to engage sociology in dialogue as weak and not focused on illuminating major debates in sociological discourse. While Shuttleworth and Meekosha are hopeful that Critical Disability Studies will continue to engage sociology in dialogue, they believe that more explicit strategies may need to be utilized. They advocate employing the ideas of Cornelius Castoriadis and other scholars working on the potential for creative imagination to rupture determinancy and transform society and notably in this instance the sociological imaginary’s deterministic understanding of concepts such as ‘disability’. This can be accomplished, they suggest, through inter-institutional and inter-cultural dialogue, which implies engaging with diverse understandings of both sociology and disability. A second strategy the authors propose is that scholars explicitly insert the concept of disability into mainstream sociological discourse on issues such as public/private and normal/abnormal. In these ways, Shuttleworth and Meekosha hope to more effectively influence the way disability is conceived in the sociological imaginary.

Goodley and Lawthom’s work seeks to situate their analysis of disability within both global and local contexts, whilst at the same time acknowledging the differences between the global North and the global South. Using two case studies, one concerning a disabled mother in Indonesia and the other about a parent of a disabled child in England, they seek to go beyond the divisive analyses that may emanate from using the global South/global North divide and reveal the shared processes that flow from globalization including the psychological, material and emotional conditions of disablism. They use evidence of the overlapping commitment and interests of activists located in very different geo-political contexts. Employing Hardt and Negri’s heuristic notions of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, they analyse how disabled people from both the North and the South are regulated by Empire in the ‘constantly evolving processes of biopolitics’ and colonization. They argue that the concept of Multitude is created by the excesses of Empire, but that disabled and marginalized peoples who constitute the ‘other’ have the potential to disrupt the ‘ontological constitution of Empire’, especially through the liberatory potential of the internet. Thus, they argue that the work of Hardt and Negri is of paramount relevance to Critical Disability Studies.

Soldatic’s paper critically engages with Mills’s notion of structure and individual biography as the starting point of her analysis. Reflecting on recent work within the political and economic geographies, Soldatic reveals the ways in which the geographical turn within sociological inquiry has overlooked the sovereignty of time as a central re-organizing structure of neoliberalism where temporal technologies of governance have become a key site of state–citizen relations under emergent workfare regimes. Disability studies has, in many ways, previously harnessed ideas of temporality as a methodological framework and a thematic point of analysis. However, too often these studies position disability within a linear conception of time: disability in the past, disability in the current historical moment and disability as re-imagined in some future time. Soldatic takes a distinct turn from such framing and methodologically, theoretically and empirically reveals the ways in which temporality is more than a mere a historical marker of disability representations, but also exists to order, measure and govern disabled bodies. Further, her analysis reveals the ways in which states harness temporal discursive markers to position the polity and those citizens defined as within the polity through the mounting of complex temporal technologies. Feminist scholars have been at the forefront of temporality studies, and Soldatic’s final section of the paper captures disabled women’s experience of temporal governing regimes via the narratives of disabled women coerced into neoliberal workfare programming. This component of the paper directly extends feminist orientations through rigorously revealing the complex negotiations of temporalities that disabled women are required to manage given their status as ‘dependent citizens of the state’, as women who provide care for others and as women who have time intensive self-care needs – an insight rarely considered within the field.

Ben-Moshe’s paper deals with another significant gap in the literature in both sociology and disability studies, that of the incarceration of disabled people. Following C. W. Mills, the incarceration of disabled people should be seen as a major ‘public issue’ that spans the global North and the global South. Ben-Moshe argues that prisons and institutions for disabled people should not be viewed through separate lenses, as they are both part of the same continuum: the prison-industrial complex. She makes the significant links between the closure of institutions for both those with mental health issues and those with developmental disabilities in the 1980s and their subsequent reopening as prisons a few years later. Her key argument entails understanding incarceration as a process of categorizing and controlling undesirable populations. Ben-Moshe does not discuss the incarceration of asylum seekers, for example those who are subject to indefinite mandatory detention in Australia (Crock et al., 2006), but her arguments would equally apply to the confinement of this population. Importantly Ben-Moshe further argues that in sociological research we must take care not to think of incarceration simply in terms of prisons. Some might view the housing of some disabled people in group homes as a humane option, but in reality these homes are simply incarceration in another form of institution. A significant contribution to an understanding of incarceration of disabled people is the use of a political economy approach to workfare and prisonfare, which Ben-Moshe argues is part of the ‘institution-industrial complex, in the form of a growing private industry of nursing homes, boarding homes, for-profit psychiatric hospitals and group homes’.

Joly and Venturiello’s paper traverses the trajectory of the Argentinean disability movement. Mapping the landscape of the disability movement, with its early origins as a radical political movement contesting the dictatorship of the 1980s through to the present moment, Joly and Venturiello reveal the continuity and significance of Marxism in their sociological analysis of the movement’s emergence, development and consolidation. They critically review the historical continuities, fluidities and disruptions of the Argentinean movement, its alliances with other civil society and social movements struggling for social justice and the numerous campaigns, compromises and advances. This Southern, critically reflective history of disability has largely been silenced within critical sociological inquiry despite the fact that South American scholarship on counter-hegemonic movements has gained substantial ground in recent years, with many activist scholars looking to the South American context as a space of hope and transformative solidarity. As Joly and Venturiello clearly highlight, disability activists have been central to South American struggles against neoliberalism. No doubt this will continue, as recent Bolivian protests attest, in the building of alliances and networks with other disabled activists in the region.

The explicit goal of this edition is to ensure that the concept of disability is no longer sidelined in sociology. We believe that this issue of Critical Sociology goes some way towards seducing the discipline into a dialogue with Critical Disability Studies. As demonstrated in this edition, there is much common ground to interrogate. Moreover there is still the need to make sure that embodiment, although it can be illuminated by the issues of disabled people, is not viewed solely in terms of the ‘Other’ in sociology but viewed as central to all human relations. As a collective project, we feel that this edition brings to critical inquiry and scholarship a vivid sense of the subtle and nuanced interplay between the micro-experience of disability biographies and macro-structural processes. In this way, we hope to advance Mills’s agenda of equality, justice and democracy.