ABSTRACT
In 2012, when the first edition of this Handbook was published, disability studies was well on the way to becoming an established and recognised field of research and a discipline in its own right. It had its own agenda, its own approach to research, a large and successful range of academic national and international organisations had emerged, all of which ran their own conferences and, had established a series of highly successful and influential academic journals. It was also starting to change the way disability was theorised outside disability studies, influencing writing across the social sciences and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, the ideas generated within disability studies were able to evidence significant impact beyond the academy. The relatively simple dualism of the social model, with its distinction between impairment and disablement, that Hasler termed ‘our one big idea’ (1993), had become, in policy terms, the most dominant model of disability. The repositioning of disability as a problem of social justice formed the basis of definitions of disability across a range of different settings, from the local right up to the national and the transnational. The social model informed policy development in the European Union, the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. While it might not have completely changed the practice, the social model had significantly altered the discourse that surrounds disability, nationally, internationally and multinationally, at the highest level. Policies and practices developed by the disabled people’s movement and disability studies had started to influence mainstream policy development. Co-production, personalisation and personal budges and assets-based approaches, once so radical and part of the disabled people’s movement’s demand for inclusion, had become well-established policy responses across a range of settings and were part of the public service reform agenda, although their origin and the debt owed to the disabled people’s movement is rarely discussed or acknowledged. The last seven years have seen the reach and impact of disability studies grow even further.
