From pathology to Affirmation: Disability Philosophy in Everyday Life

Abstract

This paper argues for an affirmative disability philosophy and research methodology. Even after four decades of critical disability studies we worry that much of what we encounter in public spaces - in relation to disability - on a day to day basis remains untouched by this critical scholarship. With reference to a composite narrative emerging from two research projects - and our own personal entanglements - we consider the dominant ways in which everyday philosophies of disability threaten to pathologise people with learning disabilities as objects and counter these by offering an  alternative affirmative philosophy. We explore disability as affirmation - humane, unbounded and full to bursting with potential - a way of knowing disability that should be a regular feature of common parlance -and philosophical discourse - but a form of knowing that requires on being informed by disabled people and critical disability studies scholarship. We explore the ways in which inserting disability-as-affirmation into everyday conversations and public life can have significant wider societal impacts - in and outside of academia - through offering a more expansive philosophy of disability.