Convention of Rights 34: Postscript, the Social Model of disability

The social model of disability has been around since the mid-1970's. It was a useful tool for changing the attitudes of people towards persons with disabilities (PWDs) because it provided a way to understand how disability operates in society. Since being described, the social model of disability has faced many criticisms (see The social model: a victim of criticism). This blog post will will detail those criticisms.

Firstly, what is The Social Model of Disability? Put simply, a person with an impairment (impairment is used instead of disability) meets a barrier to social inclusion, it is the barrier that creates the disability. This is an over simplification but it is a useful starting point to consider the social model of disability.

The 2015 article The social model: a victim of criticism discusses the social model of disability. The articles notes that after its description in the mid-1970's the social model of disability took on a life of its own, it became the big idea behind disability equality training. It also became the central focus for developing the consciousness of PWDs and helped to develop the disabled peoples’ movement. The social model of disability was a powerful tool for understanding the rights of PWDs:

Armed with the idea that we needed to identify and eradicate the disabling barriers we faced, the disabled people’s movement forced the media to change their images of us and transport providers to open up many of their services to us; public buildings became much more accessible and the legal system changed to make it illegal to discriminate against us.

The model was open to criticism which can be divided in 3 ways:

1. Embodiment: The experience of the PWD as they confront society.
2. Oppression: How the PWD is oppressed by society.
3. Inadequate theoretical basis: The theory is not developed enough and terms used need further development and discussion.

These criticisms are summed up in the 2014 article Exploring the critiques of the social model of disability: the transformative possibility of Arendt’s notion of power and they are listed here. The social model of disability:

• Does not engage with embodied experience and although separating the body from culture has meant political gains it has been at the cost of disabled people’s identities. This ‘gifts’ the body to medical interpretation.
• Focus is on physical impairment, and does not take difference into consideration; creating a hierarchy of impairment. This also ignores people with chronic illness and fluctuating impairments, delegitimising their status as disabled. Research may reify this position because it ignores impaired experience.
• Is essentialist because it ignores embodied experience, reifying the social; thereby limiting understandings of disability because personal experiences and social barriers remain undifferentiated.
• Engaging with the politics of disablement favours a materialist/Marxist worldview which means ignoring disabled people’s embodied experiences.
• Oppression is present in society but it takes different forms both explicit and implicit, but when and how these forms materialise is unclear. Oppression may also be transmitted by culture, but little is known of how oppression moderates the relationships between culture, language and socialisation.
• Oppression is a somewhat nebulous concept because it is not understood how attitudes become translated into actions, and if indeed this actually occurs.
• Oppression is poorly understood and therefore any further development of the social model is limited by the lack of conceptualisation.
• In concentrating entirely on oppression the social model of disability has become a straw man and is at risk of doing a disservice to disabled people.
• Disability is not an absolute dichotomy and there is a strong relationship between disability, social practices and impairment.
• Displays a priori thinking concerning oppression, applying it to all disabled people in defining disability as oppression.
• Using oppression in one form; the social, is a mistake because it reifies disability as the physical.
• The social model of disability needs to be further developed in order to fully explain disabled people’s experiences.
• The components of disability need to be further conceptualised in order to improve the explanatory power of the social model.

The 2004 paper The Social Model of Disability: A Philosophical Critique sums up the discussion:

As a concluding note I suggest that, despite its internal limits, the social model of disability nevertheless acts as a powerful and important corrective to our understanding of disability, to simplistic views on the experience of disability and, more importantly, to the oppressive nature of some social arrangements. This is the actual powerful core value of the model, its constant reminder to face issues of inclusion as fundamental moral issues.

From the above discussion it is clear that the social model is in need of improvement. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD) provides a new rights based model for the consideration of disability which will be considered in the next post.