Learning from the Past: Building the Future

Members of the Executive Editorial Board of Disability & Society were delighted to receive a huge number of papers in response to the Call for Papers for the journal’s 2017 Special Issue. The standard of submission was, as always for a journal of our leading international stature, very high. We are appreciative of all submissions. Those whose work has been selected deserve particular congratulations on the success and significance of their work.

The theme of Learning from the Past: Building the Future was chosen to recognize that it has been more than 30 years since Disability & Society first began publishing. During these years the journal has provided a world-leading platform for debate about human discrimination, definitions, policy and practices against a backdrop of change in the ways in which disability is viewed and responded to. It is now four decades since The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) pioneered the distinction between impairment and disability that enabled social model thinking to transform disabled people’s rights. In the US the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990 and in the UK the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has been in place for more than twenty years. At the turn of the 21st Century the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) was established as a human rights treaty to reaffirm disabled people’s human rights and entitlement. In the light of all this, we wanted to draw together an overview of how much, and in what ways, disabled people’s lives and entitlements have changed in the past 30 years and to take stock of key challenges that still lie ahead.

Taking a variety of approaches to this remit, contributors critically consider the backwash of influences which have invested medical approaches and expert-led ideas – for example, of dependency, care and normalization – with power over disabled people’s lives. They examine examples of institutionalisation, expert-led policy, professional and research practice which have driven exclusion and oppression that is still inadequately addressed. They show that unacceptable risks have been taken through marginalisation of disabled people and suppression of their own voices and perspectives, calling for these to be fully recognized at last and offering new ideas for the promotion of agency that will build a different future. They do this through wide-ranging discussions of disability theory, research, policy, practice and identity issues that offer insightful lessons learned from past studies of disability so that change can be put to in to play through conscious recognition of disabled people’s own starting points.

The analysis and projections of the contributors to the Special Issue clearly expose challenges and new tensions ahead. Collectively, for example, the papers raise questions about definition of disability and about who shares the conditions of oppression that determine policy protections and access to practical intervention to which disabled people are entitled. Immensely important going forward is the question of who can disabled people forge alliances with to empower themselves and what are the changing parameters of identity and group identities related to social injustices disabled people face? How, going forward, can lessons from the past put us in touch with more inclusive and enabling futures?

The papers that make up this Special Issue provide deep and varied insights into learning made possible from our discipline’s past that can be put to the test of careful scrutiny for thinking about building the future. The balance of papers provides much to encourage readers to reflect on the history of change in disability studies and society and to think critically about our view of what is important for the future.

As always, many thanks are due to Helen Oliver for the tireless always cheerful efficiency she has put in to supporting contributors and reviewers in production of this Special Issue and to our publishers for their continued commitment to the journal.

Michele Moore
Editor