The Politics of Disability Identity

This project aims to provide knowledge about the politics of disability identity that will help counter the mechanisms of marginalization.

Disability is one of the clearest predictors of social marginalization and an enduring problem for global sustainable development. Although disability in recent decades has become enshrined in the framework and discourse of human rights, progress has been slow or absent in socioeconomic terms. 

There is a gap between rhetoric and results in policy: Disability still correlates with poverty, low levels of education and employment, and relatively poorer life outcomes in affluent as well as less affluent societies. 

We therefore ask whether current political, legal and cultural understandings of disability amount to a misrecognition that actually hinders material progress.

Objectives

The primary objective is to provide knowledge about the politics of disability identity that will help counter the mechanisms of marginalization.

The secondary objectives are to investigate:

• how disability is normatively framed in the fields of education, employment, culture, and the public sphere
• what characterizes the relative progress of different groups of people with disabilities in these fields, and
• how normative framings enable or hinder progress for different groups of people with disabilities.