Disability Studies and the Disability Rights Movement's definitions of disability have historically focused on physical and sensory disabilities rather than on cognitive disabilities, neurodiversity based disabilities, or chronic illnesses.

Difference between Crip Theory Definition of Disability and the Disability Studies and Disability Rights Movement's Definitions of Disability

Crip Theorist Alison Kafer defines disability as a political category. Viewing disability as a political category makes it both contested and contestable. Disabled, Mad, sick, and ill people are therefore related through similar societal oppressions they experience because of their nonnormative bodyminds. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

A subsection of disability studies theory, whose name was inspired by queer theory, that emphasizes creating a theoretical approach to disability that looks at how disability functions as an ideology, a paradigm, an epistemology, and a system of oppression in addition to an identity experience.

Crip Theory 

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Disability in Crip Theory

This paper delves into the personal narratives of students with psychological and learning disabilities to discuss how ableism shapes college students' academic experiences. This paper offers possibilities for how applying the tenets of crip theory as discussed in various crip manifestos outlined in work by Alison Kafer, give practical considerations on how to create accessible academic experiences.

Prioritizing Crip Futures: Applying Crip Theory to Create Accessible Academic Experiences in Higher Education

Like Queer Theory, Crip Theory seeks to destabilize definitions of who and what are normal. This effort to destabilize for both comes from how disabled people have been pathologized in medicine. The normal Crip Theory seeks to destabilize is an illusory normal of a perfect body image, health, and body function.

Crip Theory and the Conceptualization of the Normal

This concept involves "centering the disabled bodymind at the beginning/center of knowledge production". A combination of "crip" theory and "epistemology" (the study of knowledge), this framework challenges who gets to be the "knower." It argues that knowledge should stem directly from the lived experience of the disabled bodymind, rather than disability being a subject studied from the outside by non-disabled experts.

Theoretical Advancements in DS: Cripstemologies (Johnson & McRuer)

These are described as "spaces in which disability is rendered desirable". This concept aggressively rejects deficit-based models (which view disability as a tragedy or burden). Instead, it envisions futures and social spaces where disability is valued and wanted, aligning with Nusbaum's call for research that supports the "active construction" of disability as a positive ideology rather than a static problem.

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