Critical Disability Studies has been a field since the early 2000s, this has led scholars like Helen Meekosha and Russell Shuttleworth to ask how CDS has developed as a field. Meekosha and Shuttleworth note while CDS has grown to continually question and revise previous theories and unsettle stable theoretical ground that often there is still an impulse of scholars, especially more established scholars, to become defensive when their early work is criticized. 

Because of the difference footing of these two fields there is a difference in how the fields have developed. Disability Studies has often hung closer to the idea of aspiring to be a more entrenched academic field where Critical Disability Studies, more focused with troubling the structure of academia has moved to become a more self-reflexive field often leading to a disrupted and not always easily identifiable disciplinary canon. 

Differences in Field Development between DS and CDS

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Disability Studies is often critiqued for being a discipline that has had success through the creation of journals, undergraduate and graduate programs and conferences but often does not address imminent violence to disabled individuals outside of academia. Additionally, marginalized scholars have criticized Disability Studies for focusing mainly on the perspective of the economically productive white disabled person. 

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