ABSTRACT
Following the setting of the coordinates of the theory that forms the basis for the disability minority model developed primarily in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, our task here is to identify the key characteristics of a foundational methodology for this field. The aim should be to give life to a primary positioning of disability in the UK social model as located in the environment rather than in the person, and it should also conceive of a disability identity that may no longer be accommodative for a practical politics in the age of neoliberalism. This argument charts an analysis of the shifting coordinates of historical attitudes towards disabled bodies from the late nineteenth century to the present day. These approaches to disability have steered, and have been steered by, strategies that inform the late-twentieth-century disability civil rights movement (or what will be referred to here as the advent of the minority model of disability).
