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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Hello, I'm Dan Goodley. Professor of Disability Studies and Education at the University of Sheffield. I also co-direct 'iHuman' which is an interdisciplinary research institute for the study of the human.
Now, in recent years, my research
and writing have engaged with a question. What happens when we send to disabilities a driving subject of intellectual, personal and political inquiry? This question is testimony
to the scholarly and also the political contributions of disabled people and their representative organizations.
It's not my question. And over the last five decades, disabled people, including people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments, as well as neurodiverse and folk have made disability a personal and a political matter that set in disability as the driving subjective inquiry is often underexplored in key institutions of society, including the family, education, health care, government, the workplace, places of worship, the arts and music.
Foregrounding disability brings with it a demand to re-imagine society anew. Of course, disability has always been part of history, society and culture. But as the disability scholar Tanya Tish Kosky argues, disability often appears as an absent presence.
Disabilities present is a recognized human problem, but absence as an authority in its own right. The thing is, our society tends to craft disability as a pathological deficit
that requires cure, correction or rehabilitation. Rarely in public discourse is disability
offered as a productive expression of human, intellectual, cultural, and political life.
And this negligent approach to the transformative potential of disability is apparent in the University. Many of us who work in universities like to envisage our departments, schools and research courses as liberal, transformative and radical spaces.
And yet, within these so-called radical contexts, disability is framed in deeply conservative ways as a pathological problem that the university tries to solve through policies and practices of management, bureaucracy, assessment and assimilation. Now, these typical disability responses that are sometimes framed as reasonable accommodations actually retell a familiar story.
The disability as a problem and as a problem to be solved as the university remains unchanged. But in contrast, embracing disability is a deeply intellectual source of authority, can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university. Disability might feed into a wider practice of what I termed t pathologyization.
Depathologization works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists and disabled intellectuals whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonizing activists and post-colonial theorists. Depathologize in the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonize the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource.
Depathologization is therefore one theory and practice, a praxis that sits with disability is the driver's subject of critical inquiry and social change. So depathologization reframes disability as a radical and disruptive subject that feeds into a wider community practice involved with contesting intersectional oppressions associated with ability, but also with race, with gender, sexuality, casting class.
And as many of us know in our own intellectual and interdisciplinary field of critical disability studies. Whilst we might start with disability, we rarely end with just disability. So what might mean then, to Depathologize the university?
First, we need to understand who is serviced by and benefits from the pathology ization of disability. We've got to do some serious work to restore its eyes, to politicize and sociology the very idea of pathology ization. And we need to attend to the present as well as the past. Contemplating the reasons why disabilities problem continues to be a common story of contemporary life. We know that certain industries, such as the pharmaceutical, the psychological, the psychiatric and the self-help feed off the very idea that disability is an internal human failing requiring an individual solution. When disabled people are framed as the problem. This leads social and cultural institutions like the university untouched, unchallenged, and therefore unaccountable.
We need to pathologize a common sense understandings of disability that we all carry around with us in our day to day lives. Second, we need to get real about the university. Despite our claims of being transformative and radical, Universities actually foster competitiveness, individualism, autonomy, and misguided notions of meritocracy.
Depathologization demands a pause, a time to reflect and rethink the civic responses of the university. That is the university's accountability to all of the communities it purports to serve. Depathologization invites us to pause, to meditate and reimagine the potential of the university, to also contribute to civil society.
Supporting, for example, the politics of disabled people. Those of us who work in the university, all the university and we all have work to do here. Third, we need to ask how many students staff, and visitors truly feel like they belong on a university campuses.
We know historically universities have been deeply racialized, classed in ableist spaces. They have privileged upper middle class, white and non-disabled students and staff today whose programs of diversity, equality, inclusion or those of have equity, diversity and inclusion are being dismantled around the world. And universities are also facing existential and financial crises. Many staff students feel precarious, they feel uncertain and they feel scared. Pathologize in the universities needed of, say, now more than ever, it means aligning with disabled staff and student networks as key communities of institutions.
It also means reaching out to one another to find new forms of connection, alliance and community. Fourth, to truly embrace disability as essential subjects of inquiry. Funders, donors and policymakers must channel resources to feed the civic and civil aspirations of universities working in collaboration with disabled people's organizations. And most you bringing audits, accountability, scrutiny and responsibility.
Key elements of a wider depathologizing praxis. I feel there's an urgent need for universities to mobilize their resources, but to mobilize those resources to reach out to their local, national and international communities. And in this sense, universities must work with disabled people's organizations to collaborate in research, critical inquiry, but also in education, knowledge exchange and public engagement.
Fifth, I think we should take some comfort in the fact that disability is no longer on the sidelines. Over the last decade, more and more people have been identifying as disabled or neurodivergent. Desiring disability identities unlocks further potential. A duty and a responsibility to the wider disability community. We must and can find support and solace with all this so that we can dePathologize University together.
And while a disability impairments or a neurodivergent identity is always a personal matter, we should not forget that the potential for activism community this opened up is always a public matter. We cannot do this alone and we need each other to disrupt the university.
Finally, we should say with confidence that many disabled people and their non-disabled allies are already pathologizing the university. The very presence of disabled staff and students in higher education is testimony to their activism and their resistance. And other examples of depathologization are occurring. And these include the growing representation of critical disability studies. Literature in the reading lists of modules in science, in engineering, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.
New forms of inclusive recruitment for university posts that affirm the applications made by disabled and neurodivergent folk. The tireless radical impact of disabled professionals services colleagues as they work and they bend.
University bureaucracy. The impact of disabled staff networks on their universities strategies and policies. The reach of disabled intellectuals in everyday discourse and also in the mainstream media. The support of funders such as the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust and UKRI to fund disability research projects. The higher concentration of collaborative disability research projects in universities that remunerate disabled people's organizations and work with them as partners, and the increased influence of disability theory on other forms of radical scholarship, and indeed the many early career disabled and non-disabled researchers whose theorization ethically, sensitively, thoughtfully work the hyphen of various intersectional projects to pathologize Asian brings disability from the edges to the epicenter of our wor, to reimagine the university.
We must share how disability is driving change in relation to curricula and research culture. While we might start with disability we will never end with it - and intersectional work will always have the potential to open up the culture of the university: from a closed one serving the few to an open one affirming the many.
Sure; this is only a start. Much more is needed. But in these dangerous and distressing political times depathologisation offers one avenue of hope and possibility. Rather than a problem: disability is an opportunity.