Disability, Society and Culture: Understanding Models of Disability

This book provides an accessible introduction to critical disability studies, which helps students question existing notions of disability and interrogate how these have become embedded in our social and cultural understanding of disability. This interdisciplinary text, authored by a team of leading critical disability scholars, defines and explains the core foundational concepts and models referred to in disability studies literature: the medical model, the tragedy model of disability, the social model, the cultural model, the human rights model, the affirmation model and critical disability studies. These seven particular models have been selected due to the centrality of their influence on people with disability, wider society and culture and the academic study of disability. These models provide students with new ways of understanding how disability interfaces with society and offer students from a variety of disciplines an important foundation for any further formal study in this area. This text is also co-designed with students studying models of disability, so the authors fully understand the issues students experience when learning about these models, and this text actively addresses how to overcome them. This book will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying critical disability studies from various disciplines including media and cultural studies, communication studies, disability studies and sociology.