Attitudes toward deafness can be divided into two groups: the clinical and the cultural model.

1) The Clinical Model: Deafness is viewed as a handicap, a medical condition, or a deficiency. Deafness is viewed as something needing to be fixed, through such means as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

2) The Cultural Model: People with hearing difficulties are viewed as a linguistic and cultural minority group within a hearing society, marked by difference rather than limitation.

Attitudes Toward Deafness/ Two Conflicting Models

- Important Books in the Cultural View of Disabilities


Important Literature in the Cultural Model of Disabilities

Disability and dependency used to be directly associated with each other to which if one could not take care of themselves due to a mental, physical, or developmental illness [that was not medically treatable], they were essentially considered to be disabled. With the establishment of specialized institutions, they aimed to help individuals with disabilities to become more independent. 

Association Between Disability and Dependency

Adopting a socio-cultural view of disabilities through a cross-cultural lens involves analyzing different cultures' treatments and attitudes of people with disabilities and how these connect to inclusive education and available educational opportunities. A cross-cultural analysis expands what people know about cultures and societies outside their own. This allows people to compare and find similarities in different policies and treatments, which can have implications towards international understanding of and action addressing disabilities and inclusive education.

Socio-cultural View of Disabilities and Inclusive Education Through a Cross-Cultural Lens

This model is considered to be a more nuanced approach of the social/political view of disability studies, ranging from medical to socio-political views. It explored disabilities as the interaction with the societies around them, as it was believed that one's disability is a product of the environment and bodily factors.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Pepperdine University

- Social/Political vs Medical Science View of Disabilities
- Disability Life Cycle
- Cultural Model View of Disabilities

Important Ideals of Race/Ethnicity in Disability History

Children nodes connected include several alternate ways of classifying and defining disability

- Medical Model 
- Social Model
- Identity Model
- Human Rights Model
- Cultural Model
- Economic Model
- Charity Model
- Limits Model
- Cultural Model
- Educational Model
- Functional Model
- Materialist Social Model

Conflicting Models and Definitions of Disability

Mambrol, N. (2021, May 8). Disability Studies. Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrieved January 21, 2022, from https://literariness.org/2018/12/15/disability-studies-2/ 

Disability Studies (Literary Theory and Criticism)

Since its introduction into fields of humanities and cultural studies, Disability Science has focused on creating knowledge on individuals previously classified as "others", as well as representation. This was a newer vision of disabilities, which differed from the Medical Science view. When it came to Medicine, it was primarily viewed through a different lens, as problems that need to be fixed or medical specimens.


Social/Political vs Medical Science View of Disabilities

Cultural Model View of Disabilities

Irving Zola is an American Author prominent in Disability Rights who discussed how disabilities are a universal experience due to the natural aging process resulting in the occurrence of disabilities.

Disability Life Cycle

A classification method developed by the World Health Organization to model the impacts of a disability on a person's life. In this model, disability has three components, or dimensions, in which effects of disability can be observed. These are based on impairment, activity limitation, and participation restrictions. Any particular disability may cause a positive or negative effect in all or only some of these categories. 





Three Dimensions of Disability Classification Model

The medical model positions a disability as something that must be diagnosed and addressed with medical intervention. It views disabilities as something that reduces a person’s quality of life, curing the disability as the ultimate goal. Also, the medical model promotes the image of people with disabilities as needing health care or as “sick”. Many people with the philosophy of the medical model underestimate the human capacity to learn about the complexities of the human body, and thus to make safe decisions about one’s disability.

Medical Model of Disability

The social model positions society as the disabling agent, rather than an individual’s impairment. Under the social model, an impairment is not automatically a disability. It is only a disability when society is not structured (physically, socially, or culturally) to include that impairment/variation. For example, in a society where glasses/corrective lenses are accessible and socially accepted, the impairment of having blurry vision without them is not necessarily disabling. The social model seeks to make changes in society, rather than focusing on disabled people to change.

Social Model of Disability

People that view disability from an educational perspective often see people with disabilities as needing assistance to become more like the rest of “us”. The problem with this view is that it promotes low expectations of people with disabilities, and assumes unequal relationships.This philosophy also assumes successful people with disabilities are heroic , inspirational, role-models, and/or courageous. 

Educational model of demeaning disability-friendly terminology

Alison Kafer determines that the political/relational model differs from the social model because it includes lived experiences of people with disabilities, in addition to potential medical treatments. 

Political/relational Model 

The Functional Model constructs disability in more subjective terms and takes into account how their impairment affects the functioning of a specific individual based on their daily purpose and tasks.  

The Functional Model of Disability 

In this piece, Paul Heilker examines autism as a form of rhetoric and how the various forces, media portrays, autistic community understandings, and cultural forces, work to construct autism as an overwhelmingly white phenomenon in public discourses. 

Autism, Rhetoric, and Whiteness

Developed by Michael Oliver, this model represents disability as culturally-constructed through centuries of medical thinking and knowledge systems. It argues disability concepts are deployed to attribute individual causes for systematic exclusion of certain bodies and minds. The model examines how medical discourse creates categories that justify social exclusion. It emphasizes material conditions and power structures behind disability construction.

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