Description

During my formative years I lobbied the British Government as an ally of the Disability Rights Movement (DRM) in the UK. Many years passed between that and my return to academia, but when my interests in working toward the goals of the DRM were re-awakened by a seminal class held at my university, where I investigated the phenomena of disability with more philosophically rigorous methodology. This thesis is the result of that investigation. From the outset, it seemed obvious to me that were anyone to speak properly about disability, then what was meant by 'disability' needed to be clearly understood. Yet there appeared to be no consensus of opinion over what was and was not 'disability' - the more material I read, the worse the situation became. Even more worrying was that the definition of disability with which the DRM identified, and which I was, by default, supporting all those years ago (the British social model) no longer seemed to me to be consistent or accurate. The result of my ruminations on the phenomena of disability was that every model which sought to describe the phenomena involved some fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of disability, and so everything about disability which followed from that misunderstanding was flawed.