DP challenges the reification of disability as fixed, natural, or biological truth by revealing its dynamic, social, and discursive origins. The approach shows how culturally-constructed phenomena become treated as inherent individual characteristics through discourse practices. Reification obscures the social processes through which categories like disability are created and maintained. DP makes visible the ongoing work required to sustain these categories.

State University of New York at Binghamton

- Disability as Biological vs. Cultural Construction
- Materialist Social Model
- Reification Critique
- Medicalization Processes

Challenging Traditional Disability Constructions

Lester, J. N. (Ed.). (2021). Discursive Psychology and Disability. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Reference For: Discursive Psychology and Disability

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.

Materialist Social Model

Disabilities have historically been constructed as biological truth, leading to medicalization and positioning disabled people's problems as discrete and ahistorical. This volume challenges this by viewing disability as culturally-constructed, emerging from interactions between individuals and institutional/social systems. The perspective treats "able-bodiedness" or "dis/abled-bodiedness" as produced by and existing in discourse rather than inherent characteristics. While not denying bodily realities of impairment, Discursive Psychology (DP) focuses on how these realities are negotiated within social practices.

Disability as Biological vs. Cultural Construction

Reification Critique

This refers to how human conditions and behaviors come to be defined and treated as medical illnesses requiring professional intervention. Medicalization leads to individualized diagnoses rather than social or cultural explanations for human differences. The process transforms social issues into medical problems amenable to clinical treatment. DP reveals how medicalization occurs through specific discursive practices in institutional settings.

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