The interactive approach is favored over the additive approach in disability studies because it oppses the binary and essentialist mindset of current methods.

Interactive Versus Additive Approach in Intersectional, Disability Studies Reasearch

Disability studies research that considers insectionality includes the participants in all stages of the process to emphasize inclusion, reflexivity, and anti-essentialist.

"Nothing about us without us"- Judy Heumann

Dual thinking, or thinking in terms of "and", is a method in reseacrh that allows for variable conclusions. It would bipass binary schemas by allowing room for grey areas.

Reframe Current Research Method

Clinical psychology and disability studies have long existed in separate academic, philosophical, and political spaces, especially in relation to mental health and disability. Both fields have faced significant criticism for their approaches to supporting the mental health of disabled people. This divide highlights the urgent need for mutual engagement and collaboration. Bridging these disciplines could lead to more inclusive and effective mental health support for disabled individuals.

Bridging the Disciplinary Divide on Mental Health and Disability

Disability studies resaerch often neglects the presence of an individual's identity which can have major influence over their subjective reality and reinforces oppressive systems. 

Arizona State University

- binary approach (disabled versus able-bodied)
- essentialist (focused primarily on ability status)

Current Pitfalls in the Methodology Used in Disability Studies Research

The evolution of how every topic regarding disabilities has changed over time throughout the world.

History of Disability Studies

This theory examines and critiques societies and cultures and looks at social issues and structures that lead to inequality. It identifies the people who can suppress this inequality and outlines the steps needed to reach human liberation. 

Critical Theory

Intersectionality examines the experiences of people who are experiencing discrimination on the basis of two or more marginalized identities at the same time, and how this differs from experiencing discrimnination on the basis of these identities individually.  Because of this depending on context, we all have areas where we experience privilege, as well as areas of oppression

For example, the stereotypes or preconceived notions held about black women are not merely a combination of those held about black people and those held about women, but a unique intersection of racism and sexism that black women experience differently from either black men or white women.

Intersectionality

Tina Goethals, Elisabeth De Schauwer, & Geert Van Hove. (2015). Weaving Intersectionality into Disability Studies Research: Inclusion, Reflexivity and Anti-Essentialism. DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 2(1–2), 75–94. https://doi.org/10.11116/jdivegendstud.2.1-2.0075


Weaving Intersectionality into Disability Studies Research: Inclusion, Reflexivity and Anti-Essentialism

When prioritizing the disability identity over other identifiable factors, it negates how other distinguishing factors impact the subjective disability experience. 

The Essentialist Approach Limits the Analysis of the Lived Disability Experience(s)

Research within the disability studies discapline often classifies groups based on the category of ability which discounts the variations in experience when other intersecting identities contribute to an individuals reality. 

Binary Approach to Disabillity Studies Research

Critical Perspective of Disability Studies

The evolution of how the topics within education changed over time for people with disabilities in the United States of America.

History of Education for People with Disabilities in the United States of America

This study observes the effects of navigating a university environment with psychiatric disabilities. It observes students with disabilities and their overall experiences with the faculty and staff that are at universities that they are attending. There was a small group that was being studied, with 14 students being observed in total. The major themes are:

1.	The effects of stigma on the experience of being in university
2.	Impact and effect of the symptoms for students
3.	Strategies for coping with disability in the university environment
4.	Social support roles from staff and other faculty

“It’s all in your head:” Students with Psychiatric Disability Navigating the University Environment

- History of End of Life Treatment in Disability History

History of Bioethics in Disability History

- Important  Books
- Important  Figures
- Important Ideals
- Summarization of Race/Ethics in Disability History

History of Race/Ethnicity in Disability History

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was established in 1946 and initially focused on societal views of intellectual disabilities and ways to prevent them. JPK initiated funding for research from a multitude of hospitals and a national plan was ratified. 

History of Intellectual Disabilities, Sports, and Special Olympics


The disability civil rights movement formed as a social response in the 1970’s to the longstanding oppression, stigmatization and social exclusion of people with disabilities. It was the first time in history this marginalized community used their own voices to empower themselves by fighting for policy changes that would allow for social inclusion and a more equitable social structure. 


History of the Disability Civil Rights Movement 


According to evidence from ancient cultures, such as that of the Greeks, attitudes concerning/towards disabled persons was not an attitude of “othering”. The exclusion of disabled persons and the view that they are a burden on society was something that developed with the advent of the Industrial age when a focus on production became paramount.

Ancient View of  Disability and Industrial Perception

In the English language, the concept of “normalcy” applying to humans or ways of being is not particularly old in the grand scheme of language development. Such a usage of “normal” did not enter the English language until about 1840.

The Concept of Normalcy

Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, was one of the first early statisticians to consider ideas like normalcy or ways of being of the so-called average person. Additionally, Galton was interested in eugenics and inheritance- he actually invented the word eugenics. It is worth mentioning that Galton also developed the idea that fingerprints might be inherited and should be used for identification- pushing the idea that a person’s body and the features inherited from birth are indelibly tied to their identity. 

Sir Francis Galton


In 1883, inventor and scientist Alexander Graham Bell gave a famous ableist speech titled Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. In said speech, Bell posits that d/Deaf individuals commonly choose other d/Deaf individuals to be their partners, often leading to d/Deaf children. Ultimately the speech warns that this could lead to an entire race of d/Deaf people. This may be seen as a villanization of disabled persons interacting and forming relationships.


Alexander Graham Bell and Eugenics

Karl Pearson was a leading figure in the development of the eugenics movement in the anglophone world. During the Edwardian period, Pearson led the Department of Applied Statistics in England. In his work, Pearson lumped together disabled individuals, the mentally ill, criminals, and violent individuals, villainizing disabilities overtly and proposing that they be removed from society altogether.

Karl Pearson


Charles Davenport was a biologist and leading eugenicist in America. In 1911 he founded the Eugenics Record Office. Davenport theorized that the influx of immigrants in America would increase the cases of crime and would introduce more disabled and mentally ill people.


Charles Davenport

A major critique of the current disability studies discipline relates to its essentialist and binary approach to understanding disability and the subjective disability experience. 

Disability Studies and Intersectionality


In the 1970s and 1980s, disability studies was predominantly headed by scholars and researchers employing a political and sociological focus. In the late 1980s and 1990s disability studies was popularized in the humanities and arts after being brought into the academic conversation by those in cultural studies. Around the 90s scholars therefore began looking to literature as a source of cultural commentary concerning disability and normalcy.

Disability Studies in the Arts and Humanities

The UNCRPD (The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) defines disability as long-term physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory impairments that, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder full and effective participation in society. People with disabilities are not a homogenous group, and individual experiences are influenced by factors such as impairment type, gender, age, family support, and environment.

What Is Disability?

People with disabilities are all different. They have different impairments and come from various places. This affects the medical care they need and how they get it. For example, kids with disabilities need to be identified early and get extra help when they are young. This helps them grow and do things better. Older adults with disabilities often have more than one problem, which makes it hard for them to get healthcare. Women with disabilities may face discrimination based on gender and disability and so have more difficulties accessing services. 

Who Are The People Affected by Disabilities?

This is a book published in 2020 that talks about 10 lessons for people with disabilities to thrive in today's society.

The Power of Disability

The term c/s/x movement is used to encapsulate what has been known as the psychiatric, or mental-health, consumer, survivor and ex-patient movement. This movement is considered to have first emerged in about 1970 with a multi-national history with movement work happening in North America, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, South America, and Australia by the 1980s. The movement is mainly concerned with both the promotion of self-help and peer support models of mental-health care and also a reform of the psychiatric services model.

C/S/X Movement

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected individuals with disabilities. Studies on this intersection focus on infection rates within the disability community, risk factors that increased their vulnerability to the virus, the accessibility of healthcare systems during the crisis, and recommendations for more inclusive public health responses.

COVID-19 Pandemic and People with Disabilities

The process of listening and considering ideas from as many perspectives as possible to reason a conclusion and inform an strategic academic plan. 

Critical Inquiry Theory in Education

Learning science an interdisciplinary field that works to further our understanding of learning as well as to engage in the design and implementation of learning innovations. Contributing fields include cognitive science, computer science, educational psychology, anthropology, and applied linguistics. 

Learning Science

Critical Race Theory is an interdisciplinary movement made up of activists and scholars working to understand and change the relationships between race, racism, and power. 

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Queer theory is a field of critical theory that can include different meanings, but most broadly referes to a lens that centers the abnormal (the queer) in order to demonstrate the socially constructed boundaries of the normal. 

Queer theory

Critical Practices in Literature 

Cultural Studies analyze the political dynamics of contemporary culture, such as "pop culture" and its historical basis. Cultural studies researchers review how cultural practices connect to wider systems of power associated with or operating through, social phenomena, including ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation.

Cultural Studies

The critical perspective emerged in the 1970's with roots in Black Feminism. 

History of Critical Perspective in Disabillity Studies

Black feminist thought understands race to play a role in whether society labels an individual as a woman. Thus, the term intersectionality was coined in 1989 to explain how power and status contribute to social organization and understanding. 


19th Century Black Feminist History Influenced the Inception of Intersectionality 

Because of intersectionality, people can simutaneously experience privaledge and oppression depending on the social groups we identify with. 

Reality of the Human Condition

Evidence-based treatments can work for a disability but often fail to take into account the whole person's identity. 

For example, If we are treating a Black Male who has cancer or a Black female who with an opioid use disorder, then we have to take into account the different needs that may arise in treatment. Scholarly research should also focus on the unique experience of groups and NOT how they deviate from the social norms of dominant groups.

Taking into account each client's different aspects of their identity can help the practitioner understand how their experiences shape their behavior. 

Why Intersectionality Is Important For Healthcare

Through centering Black Disabled people the Black Panther also showed how they had been influenced by the writings of Black feminists such as Frances M. Beal's conception of "double jeopardy" by using terms like multi-disabilities and double whammy to show the intersections of racism and ableism for Black disabled people. 

The Black Panthers Centering of Intersectionality 

Curative Violence was a term coined by Eunjung Kim to describe the physical and material violence inflicted against disabled people that is justified as a cure. Kim uses the term cure to mean any attempt to lessen or eliminate illness or disability. Curative violence is meant to give voice to the fact that society's ableist obsessions with curing disabled and chronically ill folk can result in further disability, or even death.

Curative Violence

The NBWHP's work is intersectional in nature because it is centered on the intersection of race and gender. This is evident both with how the organization grew out of white feminist health activism as a specifically Black feminist health organization, but also in publications and internal documents that overwhelmingly name racism and sexism as categories of oppression with major impacts on Black women's health.

Intersectionality and the NBWHP

Crip futures must be intersectionally approached. Floyd and Abrams acknowledge that their accounts of academic ableism are shaped by their whiteness and that their whiteness shielded them from some of the harsher consequences of academic ableism. Their whiteness also allowed Floyd to be valued as a learner in the interdependent classroom discussed. Abes also recognizes her whiteness can limit how she works towards crip futures because racism encourages white faculty, even those engaged in creating crip futures to overlook the experiences of disabled students of color.

Crip Futures and Intersectionality

For faculty and graduate students who are immigrants, there is not just anxiety about how disability disclosure would impact their job but, also whether it could impact their ability to get a visa, or even get accommodations and disability services back in their home country, depending on whether they are diagnosed. Additionally, ambient uncertainty is compounded for scholars who are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of colour, and scholars of marginalized genders as ambient uncertainty compounds with other microaggressions and previous harms of the academic system. 

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