Critical Disability Studies (CDS) critiques how society constructs disability, emphasizing structural exclusion and harmful binary thinking. It promotes an intersectional, social constructivist approach that values diverse abilities and challenges norms around success and dependence. Individuals with learning disabilities (LDs) and mental health struggles often face stigma, internalized shame, and social isolation, leading to anxiety, depression, and marginalization. Societal barriers further limit access to education, employment, and support. CDS calls for rethinking capability, empowering disabled individuals through self-advocacy. Future research should explore the interplay between LDs and mental health using a holistic, socially informed lens.

Stigma, Self-Hatred, and Stereotypes: Using a Critical Disability Studies Framework to Understand Learning Disabilities and Mental Illness

- understanding learning disabilities and mental illness

State University of New York at Binghamton

Critical Disability Studies has the word critical in the title to tie it to other disciplines in critical studies. Based on frameworks of critical studies, critical disability studies looks at disability as a construct or category created by current political and social systems to uphold existing power relations and systems. Because of this Critical Disability Studies is more interested with questions about the larger system that labels some bodies as disabled while also being grounded in the importance of embodiment, lived experience, and relationships with those outside of the academy. 

Critical Disability Studies

Critical social theory is a group of approaches, most prominently including critical race theory, critical legal theory, and critical disability studies that comes from theorist at the Frankfurt School in the 1930s who theories that the convergence of capitalism, bureaucracy and science was restricting the development of a critical consciousness and ability to critique societal functioning. The heart of more modern critical social theory - along with post-Marxist, post-structuralist, postmodernists, and post-positive theorizing - is the idea of problematizing issues including the terms we are using, or the assumptions given to us, understanding society and culture as something much more dynamic than can be captured purely quantitatively, and a focus on the linking of theory and liberatory praxis. 

Critical Social Theory

Disability studies is based around the premise that if the built environment was made more accessible and that accessibility was enforced through a legal system, that indequities that create disability would lessen to the possible point of disability disappearing as a form of embodiment. Disability Studies is focused around the social model.

Whereas, Critical Disability Studies is more centered around examining a political-relational model of disability that understands disability as a contestable and transformable category that has been created by larger political and historical forces - a political/relational model of disability, and more pointedly understanding how the category of disability both plays out in individual's lives while also critiquing and examining the system that created the model of disability.

Difference between Critical Disability Studies and Disability Studies

References for critical disability studies can be found in the child nodes below.

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