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Ableism has recently been advanced as a new theoretical lens to con-ceptualize these processes of marginalization (Williams & Mavin,2012).Defined as a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces aparticular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projectedas the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’(Campbell,2001, p. 44), ableism draws attention to the discursive practi-ces through which people are sorted, categorized and labelled either aable-bodied or disabled. This notion has increasingly been applied in theliterature on work and organizations, showing how, once so classified individuals become either ‘unemployable’or at best confined to lower-rank positions at workplaces and in the labor market (e.g. Foster &Wass,2013; Holmqvist, Maravelias & Skålen,2013; Jammaers, Zanoni &Hardonk,2016). Drawing on post-structuralist theory and, especially thework of Foucault, the emergent literature has examined the disciplinary role of a binary structured language reaffirming the primacy of able-bod-iedness over disability. It has advanced prior social model research ondisability at work, which highlighted the disabling effects of a social con-text made for able-bodied individuals (Barnes & Mercer,2005), by pro-posing an alternative understanding of power in neoliberal times asoccurring through the constitution of specific forms of subjectivity and workplace identities.While the focus on the power of language was timely in disabilitystudies (Corker,1999), with rare exceptions (e.g. Jammaers et al.,2016)analyses of ableism have tended to focus on how meaning is producedthrough specific authoritative discourses, leaving the social practices con-stitutive of ableism largely unattended (Campbell,2009). Yet, arguably, power effects do not only ensue directly from the normalization and institutionalization of ableist identity categories, they crucially arise from how such categories inform the enactment of social practices that pro-duce and reproduce a social order privileging able-bodiedness over dis-ability over time.This study draws on Bourdieuan theory to advance an understanding of ableism as a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu,1989,1990), operat-ing as an arbitrary organizing principle of social practice in the work-place. Over the past two decades, Bourdieu’s theory has increasinglybeen adopted to examine social practice in organizations as the buildingblocks of social reality (Sieweke,2014; Townley,2014). This perspective is particularly helpful to theorize the‘practice-based aspects of ableism’2520E. JAMMAERS ET AL.because it appreciates how power is enacted hrough social practice, such as the interactions in which people engage (Bourdieu,1977; Wacquant,1993) in their struggle for various forms of capital within a given field(Tatli &€Ozbilgin,2012). For Bourdieu, practices are produced not merely through norms as expressed through language but rather through habitus, the system of durable embodied dispositions acquired throughsocialization (Bourdieu,1990). To understand practice, agents’‘practicallogic’originating in their habitus and shaping their‘feel for the game’and the regularities of the social field need to be addressed (Maton,2008, p. 53). It is this practical logic that ultimately affects their ability toplay the game in ways that allow them to accrue various forms of capital. second contribution of this study concerns the role of disabled people as strategic players aware of the rules of the game in the field. A Bourdieuan perspective is conducive to seeing that disabled employees are not only defined by ableist rules–an aspect of the operation of power which is prominent in the extant literature (Goodley,2014) theyalso participate in social practice by actively taking positions, striving forthe accrual of their own capital. Although the rules of the game atBankCorp are manifestly structured along the disabled/able-bodied bin-ary to enforce social practices producing‘desirable’bodies/minds, dis-abled employees’position-takings show more heterogeneity. As illustrated by the juxtaposition of the cases of Dieter, Julie and Markwho all navigate the same highly competitive space, some disabled agents prove much better equipped than others to develop asens pratique, takea position, deal with the ableist rules of the game, and acquire the valuedsets of capital. Their comparison showcases the need to accurately graspthe operation of ableism and its effects and look beyond the disabled/able-bodied dichotomy structuring the field in an ableist way, which hasbeen at the core of the literature on ableism to date (Campbell,2009).At the same time, our research design presents some limitations.Future research might want to use a broader sample of workers includ-ing able-bodied ones with otherwise similar forms of capital in one andthe same social field. This would allow for a comparative examination ofthe effects of ableist norms on all workers, including those closer toembodying such norms. Moreover, it would facilitate a more fine-grainedanalysis of how agents’embodied dispositions and capacity to accruecapital might be simultaneously shaped by multiple principles organizingthe social field exerting symbolic violence, such as for instance gender,(hetero)sexism and ageism. This recognizes that dispositions associatedwith specific types of embodiments are likely to similarly constitute(negative) forms of cultural capital (Huppatz,2009; McCall,1992). To the extent that the arbitrarily established rules of the game reflect com-plex power relations in an organization (cf. Robinson & Kerr,2009), they are likely to exert symbolic violence through multiple hierarchized binaries, something we could only get a sense of in this study. Tellingly, the only two disabled employees in our study who manage to be‘fish inwater’were both young and male and had a technical education. Conversely, those who were‘out of water’were older and/or female,and/or with low-level or non-technical education. This suggests thatsymbolic violence is exerted in complex ways, taking at once not onlythe form of ableism but also of other‘–isms’. Further empirical2538E. JAMMAERS ET AL.investigation and theorization untangling such complexity is thereforewarranted (cf. Goodley,2014; Oksala,2013; Roberts & Mahtani,2010).Our study further builds on prior discursive research on ableism byshowing how organizational norms do not exert power solely by virtueof workers’identification with them in view of building a positive workidentity (Jammaers et al.,2016), but also, more fundamentally, becausethey come to structure the social field in which actors are socialized andthus learn embodied dispositions which come to define who they are inrelation to others (cf. Dick,2008). Ableism thus informs the field notonly as a semiotic/cultural space, but also as a space of objective posi-tions, drawing attention to the close relationship between discursive andsocial practice at the analytical level of both the individual and theorganization. Different to discursive research which points to the vio-lence of language on the subject’s identity, a Bourdieuan approach toableism emphasizes the role of embodied social practice in enforcing symbolically violent norms, highlighting agents and the effect of theirp ractice on the unequal distribution of prestige and material rewards. This rich conceptual vocabulary avoids the pitfalls of approaches whichdetach language from the social by focusing on identities (including sub-ordinate ones) as a modality of power in themselves (Zanoni, Janssens,Benschop & Nkomo,2010). Future research might want to draw onBourdieu’s work to contribute to current debates on the relationshipbetween ableism as a discursive binary and materiality, including mater-ial inequality (e.g. Zanoni,2011).

Beyond the COVID pandemic, the relative global burden of communicable disease has declined. Non-communicable conditions such as strokes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have increased as causes of global mortality. They have also contributed to the growing prevalence of disability. In 2017, an estimated 80 percent of all disabilities globally were caused by non-communicable diseases, with lower back pain, headaches, and depressive disorders the leading causes.1 By 2018, approximately 15 percent of the world’s population had a disability, with up to 190 million adults having functional difficulties.2 Following the biomedical model, disability is frequently conceptualized as a biological phenomenon and equated with impairment. Irrefutably, many individuals experience impairments that restrict their lives, and it would be churlish to deny the real benefits medical interventions have made to alleviating distress. Yet it would be a mistake to perceive all such individuals as inherently disabled. Over four decades ago, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, an organization of socialist-inspired British disability activists, argued that a distinction must be made between impairment and disability.3 In this, disability must be understood as a social concept encapsulating the oppression and exclusion experienced by individuals with impairments.4 It originates from the socioeconomic conditions of capitalism. It is a social status predicated on, and portraying, the incompatibility between the corporeal functionality of an individual with an impairment and the requirements of the production process. In what follows, I offer a historical-materialist analysis of the relationship between disability, the body, welfare, and capitalism in order to further develop a Marxist understanding of disability. I also assess how the British welfare state, given recent changes to British disability policy, determines who is able-bodied and who is disabled, with this evaluation made in regard to the needs of monopoly capitalism. Marx and Engels: The Body and Capitalism Under capitalism, disability is considered an inherent biological characteristic of individuals who have physical, cognitive, or mental health impairments, resulting in their functioning being limited relative to what is deemed societally “normal.” Conceptions of able-bodied and disabled, influenced by the biomedical model, are determined by notions of biological normality and understandings of physiological acceptability. Disability and impairment are generally constructed as interchangeable. However, from a Marxist perspective, a distinction must exist between impairment and disability. While accepting the existence of impairment as a biological reality, and not denying the role of sociocultural determinants that operate at the superstructural level, it is important to recognize that the single most significant determinant of disability is the organization of the mode of production based on the maximization of profit. Economic exploitation, Marta Russell argued, contributes greatly to determining who is both disabled and able-bodied.5 For capital, labor power—the capacity to work—is the source of value. Thus, bodies that can be exploited in the labor process are paramount. As a result, the inability to work is instrumental in identifying individuals considered disabled. Thus, disability is a social status representing the social and economic disadvantages experienced by individuals with impairments, illustrating their oppression and marginalization, with the most prominent reason for this being an incompatibility between their corporeality and the requirements of exploitative wage labor. Although neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels developed a theory of disability, the origins of one can be identified within their analysis of the relationship between capitalism and the body. Labor, Marx argued, is a corporeal phenomenon requiring the “exertion of the bodily organs” with the laborer setting “in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body.”6 The labor process, Marx asserted, dictates bodily actions, greatly determining what type of bodily capacity is required to function within the labor market. This gives rise to the idea of a normative bodily capacity, with individuals having to possess a particular corporeal potential to function as part of the labor force in general, operating as “conscious organs,” who “co-ordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton.”7 Capital subsequently imposes conditions on workers, with their bodies having to adapt to the tempo, demands, and expectations of the labor process. Workers synchronize their own movements “to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automation.”8 In this shift, “the machine makes use of [workers]…it is the movements of the machine that [they] must follow.”9 The expectation of a correspondence between corporeal ability and operational needs of the labor process, nonetheless, engenders a possible antagonistic relationship between body and machine if bodily capabilities do not conform to the productive potential of the means of production and labor process. Invoking the concept of “weak bodies,” Marx was adamant that the profitability of the means of production was constrained by the limitations of the normative human body.10 Representing a clash between natural biological “givens” and science, the material composition and corporeal capacity of the body restricts the full inherent productivity of the means of production, preventing individuals from keeping up with the full potential of the productive process. The means of production may go on producing indefinitely, being a possible source of perpetual motion and production, but only, Marx announced, if not met “with certain natural obstructions in the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human attendants.”11 The implications of Marx’s position is that individuals whose corporeal capacity varies from the standards of the normative body have the potential to be considered a greater obstacle to the production process. Any impairment would possibly limit the potential of the productive apparatus further than that which arises from the limitations already possessed by the normative body. From this, there then emerges the notion of some bodies having less economic value than others. Accordingly, the social exclusion of many disabled individuals is firmly grounded within capitalism’s rejection of them as a source of economic value due to the incompatibility between their corporeal nature and the requirements of the labor process. As Russell argues, “a primary basis of oppression of disabled persons…is their exclusion from exploitation as wage laborers.”12 Although not investigating disability, Marx and Engels did not avoid the issue of impairment. Passionately, they denounced how production inflicted physical degradation on the laboring masses, arguing that the scars of the class struggle were laid bare on the bodies of the working class. Capitalism, Marx argued, “squanders human lives…and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain.”13 Attentive observation of this was made by Engels, who exemplified the direct suffering capitalism wreaked on the body.14 Integrating the body with the operational requirements of the labor process, Engels stressed that impairments were customary. Frequent bending and stooping, which characterized factory production, resulted in deformities of workers’ backs, shoulders, and knees.15 Industrialization, Engels argued, contributed to “multitudes of accidents of a more or less serious nature, which have for the operative the secondary effect of unfitting him for his work more or less completely.”16 Impairment, Engels claimed, reduces the ability to labor and acts as a barrier to its sale as individuals no longer possess the optimal physical functioning to participate. Thus, their use value as a form of labor is reduced, being in less demand as a source of economic exploitation. Here, the basis of a Marxist understanding of disability is further illuminated, as Engels depicts the economic and social exclusion individuals with impairments may experience. Excluded from labor, Marx stressed that individuals with impairments joined the ranks of the reserve army of labor, unable to work and whose existence was largely of pauperism.17 Described as “demoralised” and “ragged,” they were, Marx argued, “victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery.”18 The fact that the conditions of production contribute to the emergence of disability is indisputable. Importantly, the capitalist state is instrumental and embroiled in reinforcing and solidifying disability as a category. The political apparatus of monopoly-capitalist society intervenes with social policies that are intrinsic to defining who is, and is not, disabled. Primarily the responsibility of the welfare system, the state directly imposes on individuals, and reinforces, the category of disabled, or alternatively denies that status, against an assessment of an individual’s ability to labor and the requirements of production. Disability and Dependency under Capitalism Facing exclusion from the labor process, disabled individuals are likely to require social support. Between July and September 2019, an estimated 6.7 percent of disabled people in Britain were unemployed, compared to 3.7 percent of non-disabled. Additionally, a further 43 percent were economically inactive, thus they were not in work or actively seeking it, in comparison to 15 percent of non-disabled individuals. In total, 52.4 percent of working-age disabled people in Britain were employed compared to 81.8 percent of non-disabled individuals.19 Similarly, in the United States, in 2019, 7.3 percent of disabled individuals were officially unemployed compared to 3.5 percent of those without disabilities. Of all disabled individuals of working age in the United States, 66.3 percent were not in the labor force.20 The result of high rates of worklessness is that material deprivation pervades the experience of disability. In 2016, an estimated 25 percent of working-age disabled individuals in Britain were considered to live in “deep” poverty, existing on an income below 50 percent of the medium, in comparison to 13 percent of non-disabled people.21 Moreover, between 2016 and 2017, of all families in Britain living below 60 percent of the medium income, after housing costs, 45 percent had at least one member who was disabled.22 In the United States, in 2017, an estimated 29.6 percent of working-age disabled individuals were in poverty, compared to 13.2 percent of those without disabilities.23 With poverty and exclusion from the labor market characterizing life for many disabled people, dependency becomes a means of survival. Relative to the often negative attitudes toward social groups not in work, disabled individuals are ordinarily accepted as deserving of social support. Grounded in the dominance of the biomedical model, disabled individuals tend to have a special moral status, with their dependency broadly accepted. Being considered disabled primarily through no fault of their own, individuals are viewed as having little, if any, control over their biological status. There is an assumption that they would work if they could, but their bodies prevent them.24 As a result, they are generally thought of as entitled to support from welfare services to ensure their material existence.25 A contradictory institution, the welfare state under monopoly capitalism is a dialectical phenomenon, emerging from, and shaped by, class struggle. It is a reflection of class conflict and the balance of class forces at any one time, encapsulating to varying degrees the interests of both capital and the working class.26 Yet, it ultimately exists as part of a capitalist state, the intention of which is the indelible preservation of capitalism. The welfare system is essential to aiding the long-term accumulation of capital, both in terms of establishing the conditions of surplus-value creation and legitimizing capitalism.27 Much of this is bound up with its role within the process of social reproduction, a practice whereby, through the provision of services such as health, education, and social security, among others, individuals are “reproduced” in the sense of being functioning members of capitalist society, people who accept the class-based nature of society and the economic base that underpins it, and more specifically as a source of labor ready to partake within the production process. In relation to disabled individuals who are considered deserving of social support and accepted as exempt from having to offer their labor power for sale, the welfare state assumes responsibility for reproducing their material conditions at a basic level due to their reduced opportunity to engage in wage labor. All societies, Ian Gough argued, create categories of individuals unable to maintain themselves through labor.28 Within the advanced capitalist nations, welfare services constitute the primary means of distributing a proportion of society’s surplus produced during production, by members of the labor force, to those unable to engage in labor themselves. Historically, churches functioned as the only social welfare for disabled people. Although during Marx’s lifetime the nucleus of what would become the welfare state barely existed, he was nevertheless acutely aware of this form of redistribution, acknowledging it as an inevitable characteristic of capitalism. Recognizing a proportion of the population for varying reasons were excluded from labor, they were “through force of circumstances,” Marx proclaimed, “made dependent on exploiting the labor of others.”29 Consequently, defined as having limited value as a form of exploitable labor, many disabled individuals are recipients of welfare services that transfer to them a portion of society’s surplus to compensate for their exclusion from wage labor. Social security provision acts as a vital source of purchasing power that would otherwise largely be unavailable, allowing disabled people to obtain necessities that contribute to their reproduction. Contradictorily, socialized health services potentially inflict restrictive forms of intervention and control, while also constituting significant methods of enhancing individuals’ physical existence. In addition to supporting their reproduction, the purchasing power provided ensures an element of material and physical protection that is hoped will be accepted as a form of remuneration, quelling any opposition to capitalism and the conditions contributing to their inability to fully engage in the labor process. This illustrates the welfare state’s role in attempting to maintain social harmony and legitimize capitalism.30 Disability, Welfare, and the Reserve Army of Labor Although not situating her analysis within a Marxist framework, Deborah Stone illustrates the significance of the welfare state for establishing who is disabled. Disability, she asserts, is a socially constructed category allowing society to delineate the perimeter between ability to work and dependency, arguing its purpose is to “keep everyone in the work-based distributive system except for the very neediest people, those who have legitimate reason for receiving social aid.”31 Correctly, Stone contends that the state makes use of disability as an evaluative category to determine the size of the labor force.32 Although recognizing this economic function, Stone, primarily understands disability as a “formal administrative category that determines the rights and privileges of a large number of people.”33 This, however, ignores the capitalist context within which welfare states function. Stone’s principle assertion is that, as a category, disability identifies who is and is not capable of work. Here, the capacity to work must be understood within the operative needs of capitalism. Despite efforts to assort types of disability against objective clinical measurements as part of the biomedical model, disability under capitalism is not a fixed category, but fluid. While the biomedical model may equate it with impairment, not all impairments are categorized as a disability. For example, less-than-perfect eyesight is not considered a disability in today’s world. Value-laden judgments of medical professionals, activists, and the state influence whether an impairment will be given the status of a disability. Under monopoly capitalism, the welfare state is central to determining who is considered disabled, but this evaluation is not isolated from the mode of production. As already argued, disability is mainly defined by the corporeal requirements of the labor process, providing the broad context within which evaluations are made and the basis on which many social policies operate. More specifically, who is considered disabled is bound up with the welfare state’s role in regulating and reproducing the supply of labor. Always predicated on corporeal expectations of wage labor, who is identified as disabled will often vary depending on the specific needs of capitalism at any historic moment, with the category of disability adapted to correspond broadly with the historical socioeconomic context and the needs of the accumulation process at any one time.34 This flexibility is inextricably related to the role individuals with impairments have as part of the surplus labor population. As illustrated, for Marx, individuals unable to work due to impairment were often reduced to members of the reserve army of labor. This surplus population constitutes a disposable resource for capital as a pool of potential labor to be exploited when needed.35 Specifically, Marx bequeathed to it the role of regulating the existing labor force that, “during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check.”36 For Marx, the reserve army of labor has the function of quelling discontent during periods of economic decline, while moderating exuberant challenges during times of prosperity, crucially with regard to wage demands.37 Fundamentally, it acts as a method of control, restraining wage growth and reducing labor costs.38 An eclectic group of individuals, Marx distinguished between three broad categories of people in the reserve army of labor, with an additional substratum: (1) the floating population consisting of those who are unemployed as a result of the normal business cycle but searching for work; (2) latent members, who primarily included unemployed agricultural workers, who grew as capitalism came to dominate as an economic system; and (3) stagnant members, defined by irregular part-time and casual employment, resulting in reduced labor market skills and a “precarious” material existence well below the working-class average. Additionally, Marx identified “the lowest sediment of the relative surplus-population,” including individuals with impairments, as those who exist in a state of pauperism.39 However, over the last half a century or more in the monopoly-capitalist economies, it is more accurate to depict disabled individuals as overall having occupied a fluid position between groups who experience severe poverty outside of the labor market and that of the stagnant population who experience irregular employment. For the reserve army of labor to fulfill its function of regulating the existing labor population, it is vital that a plentiful supply of floating members exists, as they are closest to the labor market at any one time, in terms of actively seeking work, being prepared for it, engaging with training, and still possessing relevant skills and experience developed during previous periods of work. As a result, they potentially constitute the greatest threat to existing members of the labor force as a viable source of alternative labor. Far from a static concept, the composition of the reserve army of labor is fluid, with permeable boundaries between it and the labor force. For example, the history of capitalism in the monopoly-capitalist nations is illustrative of periods of both integration within, and exclusion of, disabled individuals from the labor market in response to historically specific conditions of accumulation.40 Over the last decade, in Britain, as in many other advanced capitalist nations, the focus has once again turned to working-age disabled people as a source of labor, exemplified by social security reforms designed to increase their participation within the labor force. Attempting to transform them into floating members of the reserve army of labor through a reassessment of their corporeal status evaluated against the labor process, this has taken the form of the welfare state intervening to reconceptualize the category of disability on behalf of capital.41 Welfare Reform and the Disabled Labor Force The last decade has witnessed the British state seek to redefine disability, influenced by attempts to expand the supply of labor. Obscuring the boundaries between welfare and labor market policy, efforts have been made to transform disabled individuals into floating members of the reserve army of labor through social security reforms, which, while continuing to provide an element of out-of-work income support, have been utilized as an economic policy bolstering the provision of labor.42 In doing so, these efforts echo Claus Offe’s assertion that social policy is the “state’s manner of effecting the lasting transformation of non-wage labourers into wage-labourers.”43 In Britain, the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) has emerged as a major disability policy, coming to constitute the primary income-replacement benefit for working-age disabled individuals, establishing itself as the principle means whereby a disabled individual’s work capability is assessed.44 Presented as a means of providing greater opportunities for individuals to obtain employment, the recent logic of the ESA has fundamentally been to expand the supply of labor through a process of “upskilling.” Integral to the ESA have been efforts to define who is disabled, with this predicated on a work capability assessment (WCA) evaluating an individual’s corporeality and biological status in relation to expected performance within the labor force. Subsequently, entrenched within the ESA is the assessment of an individual’s claim to disability against the nature of the labor process that contributes greatly to evaluating an individual’s disability status. Prior to the implementation of the ESA, the main income-replacement benefit for working-age disabled individuals in Britain was the Incapacity Benefit, which also had a work-based assessment as a component. However, under the ESA, this assessment process has become more stringent.45 The threshold for defining disability has increased, meaning individuals who under past assessments may have been identified as disabled and incapable of work now have a greater chance of being deemed suitable for employment. When reassessing individuals during the transition period from the Incapacity Benefit to the ESA, between 2010 and 2013, 22 percent of applicants who were entitled to support under the old program were considered capable of work after assessment by the new WCA criteria.46 Central to the ESA, therefore, has been the redefinition of disability when assessed against the labor process, in an effort to construct a greater number of individuals as able-bodied and slash welfare provision. While the ESA exists as a mechanism of regulating who occupies the category of disabled, this is overwhelmingly for the purpose of determining who is, and is not, thought suitable for wage labor, and thus who is, and is not, entitled to government aid. After the mandatory WCA, if deemed ineligible for support, applicants are identified as fit for work and compelled to join the ranks of the unemployed as able-bodied. If eligible for the ESA, individuals can be sorted into two groups. The first is the Work Related Activity Group. Accepted as disabled, they are nonetheless considered as having some capacity to work in the future. Subsequently, they are mandated to engage in work-related initiatives or risk losing their benefits, but do not have to obtain employment. Despite reduced expectations that individuals will actively pursue work, the out-of-work income support for this group is limited, and in 2017 it was reduced for new claimants, comparable to unemployment benefit, in the hope that it would encourage people to “voluntarily” opt into the labor market. Finally, if regarded unfit for work, applicants are placed into the Support Group, with no expectation to engage in work or work-related activities. They receive a rate of benefit greater than those in the Work Related Activity Group. Of all completed WCAs between October 2013 and June 2018 (before appeals), 53 percent of applicants had been placed into the Support Group, followed by 37 percent deemed fit for work, and 10 percent categorized as part of the Work Related Activity Group.47 Subsequently, just under half of applicants were constructed as floating members of the reserve army of labor, either compelled to pursue work immediately or engage with work-related training, demonstrating interaction with the labor process. As a welfare policy, the ESA has primarily contributed to the creation of a surplus labor population, comprised of individuals who are prepared for future work. Less concerned with identifying current employment opportunities, the ESA’s objective has been largely to expand the reserve army of labor with people who have the required skills and attitudes, and who can seamlessly transition to the labor market when needed. That the supply of potential labor should grow at a rate greater than opportunities to enter the labor market is not an aberration, but fundamental to the success of the reserve army of labor. Wage restraint and social control is only feasible with an increasing supply of surplus labor waiting outside of the labor market.48 Instrumental to identifying able-bodied members of the floating reserve army of labor (those classed as fit for work), the ESA’s role in maintaining and reproducing individuals still officially classed as disabled, but who have been identified as capable of joining the floating surplus labor population, thus becoming part of the labor market, is most succinctly illustrated in relation to the Work Related Activity Group. One of the primary purposes of the mandatory work-based initiatives is to ensure the long-term reproduction of their ability to labor. This component of the ESA has the responsibility of ensuring that this particular group, although officially classed as disabled, retain its capacity to work while outside of the labor market. It is crucial that their ability to labor is reproduced, if not for the present, then for the future, should they be absorbed into the labor market after any mandatory reassessment of their ESA claim is made, and their status as disabled potentially reevaluated and rescinded. For the remaining 53 percent of applicants of the ESA who, between 2013 and 2018, were not required to seek work or engage in work-related activities, it was acknowledged that their corporeal nature was inadequate for the requirements of capitalist production, with little expectation that they join the ranks of the floating reserve army of labor. Although, given the fluid nature of the disability category, this means that in the future they may be assimilated into the labor force or transferred to the Work Related Activity Group category. As part of the Support Group, the state has a responsibility to maintain them. Their material existence is underpinned by the redistribution of a proportion of society’s surplus produced during production by members of the labor force. While there are those in this category who have some of the severest impairments and are unlikely to have the capacity to work regardless of the conditions of labor, there are also many within the Support Group who continue to remain victims of capitalism’s exclusionary economic organization. Finally, as a consequence of the conditions of their labor, disabled individuals, even if employed, have the potential to remain members of the surplus labor population, in the sense of occupying positions characterized by precariousness and underemployment. Within the labor force, the reserve army of labor is identified by the mass of unemployed and underemployed individuals.49 Temporary, seasonal, zero-hour contracts and part-time employment, characterized by low pay and insecure conditions, is seized on by capital to control and threaten full-time employees, contributing to a reduction in wages and benefits. From only a cursory examination, disabled people in Britain are likely to remain part of the surplus labor population even while working, having a greater chance of being employed in low-paid service-sector occupations, such as sales, customer service, and caregiving positions, generally on a part-time and irregular basis.50 Moreover, as Russell argues, disabled employees are more likely to be seen as disposable and disregarded in the early stages of economic decline.51 As such, even when in work, they exist within a state of precariousness and insecurity. Disability and Justice: An Alternative Rather than a physiological issue, disability is a form of oppression and discrimination. While impairments have characterized individuals across space and time, and exist as a biological reality, disability is a capitalist construct, determined by the system’s drive for accumulation, which conflicts with the corporeality of individuals with impairments. This oppression is reinforced by the state, managing and regulating their social status as either dependent or occupying various positions within the surplus labor population. With capitalism at the heart of their exclusion, disabled individuals are central to the class struggle. However, at the turn of the millennium in the United States, and in more recent years in Britain, disability rights activism has been subsumed into the political mainstream, diluting its once more radical nature.52 In Britain, Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes addressed the “professionalization” of disability politics, noting a decline in the authority of grassroots organizations as large charities and governments adopted, and adapted, the causes advocated by the movement, sanitizing its goals.53 Moreover, in both Britain and the United States, epitomizing the appropriation of the disability cause by the political mainstream, rather than focusing on the structures of inequality, a “rights-based” approach has dominated the agenda, reflecting a liberal preference for equal opportunities. Undoubtedly, legal equality is essential, but as other oppressed groups can testify to, it is not the solution. The emancipation of disabled individuals through the granting of equal rights has become an end in itself. But social justice will always be elusive if oppression is concluded to be primarily the result of largely voluntaristic discriminatory practices and attitudes, rather than the consequence of an economy that has commodity production at its heart. As Russell argued, “if we conceptualise disablement as a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society…then it becomes clear that anti-discrimination legislation…is insufficient.”54

Regrettably, at the onset of 2023 – there remain multiple vectors through which people with disabilities face discrimination. These can range from inaccessible and inconsiderately designed public spaces and transportation infrastructure to more subtle, yet arguably just as damaging forms of inequitable treatment such as inaccessible websites and negative public attitudes. Nonetheless, where the flames of injustice undoubtedly burn most ferociously is when discrimination penetrates those areas that exist for the sole purpose of protecting and assisting the most vulnerable in society. The welfare and benefits system is, perhaps, the most obvious example of such a sphere. Welfare discrimination typically manifests in several different ways – all of which can be deeply upsetting for claimants with disabilities and can encourage them to dwell on uncomfortable existential threats, such as whether they are welcome participants within society and if they will realistically be able to financially sustain themselves in the future. Many disabled claimants that have battled with the welfare system, be it in the U.S. or western Europe will testify that one of the most egregious and stress-filled forms of discrimination is the presumption of dishonesty – whereby even claimants living with incurable lifelong conditions are required to submit onerous levels of medical evidence year upon year. Another complaint from claimants relates to a sense of gamification in the system. That is to say, rather than making application processes as equitable and accessible as possible – they are purposefully designed to be difficult to navigate through the weaponization of misleading and unclear language and processes. The impression here is that there exists an element of playing to the gallery in demonstrating to the taxpaying electorate that the government is fiscally responsible and tough on welfare. The bigger question could of course be – who is it that’s being asked to pay the highest price? Of course, if Government doesn’t want to appear overtly deliberate in its intentions to isolate and marginalize people with disabilities – there is always the age-old tactic in disability discrimination of simply saying nothing at all and looking the other way. This works exceptionally well because disability discrimination is, to put it bluntly – entrenched across all parts of society. It is the most steadfast of defaults with it's occasional absence usually being the exception that proves the rule. Therefore, perpetuating it couldn't be easier – just do nothing and let the status quo fossilize and calcify all by itself. A prime example of this is the recent story published in the Washington Post about the way in which job roles that have been obsolete for decades are still being used by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to assess claimant’s suitability for work. These job roles include nut sorter, dowel inspector, egg processor or cutter-and-paster of press clippings. As these jobs are still listed in the federal government’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles, which was last updated in 1977 – they can still technically be used to deny claimants welfare benefits on the grounds of being able to carry out one of these roles. This is in spite of the fact that the U.S. Department of Labor, the original author of the index, abandoned it in 1991 due to prevailing economic shifts and changes in labor patterns. Apparently, it has been a long-held ambition of the SSA to revise the list and eventually update it into something more reflective of 21st-century labor trends. Unfortunately, more than 3 decades, encompassing the entire period that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been on the statute, is deemed an insufficient quantity of time by the SSA to accomplish this task and so, for disabled American welfare claimants, the long wait goes on. Kevin Liebkemann, a New Jersey attorney who trains disability attorneys told the Washington Post, “It’s a great injustice to these people…..We’re relying on job information from the 1970s to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down to people who desperately need benefits. It’s horrifying.”

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

For many people with disabilities, most of their income does not come from employment. Because people with disabilities are unable to find and maintain well-paying secure jobs because of labor market discrimination and other structural barriers, they rely on government supports, family, and savings to attain some level of financial security. Compared to other groups, racial minority women with disabilities with less than a high school degree are more likely to rely on income sources outside of employment (Maroto et al. 2019). Studying disability, the labor market, and socioeconomic policies reveals how important employment is in staving off economic insecurity, and it also highlights the complex tension between unemployment and income from sources other than work, especially government benefits. This tension points to pervasive underlying attitudes about who is and who is not deserving of government support, couched in the belief that people on benefits do not want to work—which has been challenged by numerous studies showing otherwise (e.g., Livermore 2011; Ali, Schur, and Blanck 2011). This research also brings to light perspectives on the role of rights legislation and income supports when it comes to labor market outcomes and economic security more generally— namely, lumping important anti-inequality and antidiscrimination legislation in with extant systems of disability-related government benefits. During talks surrounding the enactment of the ADA, some policy stakeholders, especially businesses and their interest groups, already viewed the law through the lens of redistribution—taking resources from some and giving these as benefits to others—rather than as a mechanism to even an unequal playing field (Pettinicchio 2019). About a decade after the ADA took effect, Acemoglu and Angrist’s (2001) pivotal study created a framework and sets of assumptions for subsequent social science research into the idea that laws like the ADA coupled with government benefits served to disincentivize employers from hiring disabled people and potential employees with disabilities from being in the labor market. Their findings have been challenged by subsequent work (see Kruse and Schur 2002; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2014b). Empirical inconsistencies also abound when it comes to the purported effects of government benefits and supports on employment. For example, although Maroto and Pettinicchio (2014b) find that people living in states with ADA-like laws saw better employment outcomes, they did find a negative relationship between Social Security Disability Insurance and employment. More recently, Sevak et al.’s (2018) analysis of ACS data suggests that even though living in a U.S. state where Supplementary Security Income is more than 100 dollars higher than the national average is associated with a very small likelihood of being unemployed, it also only represented about 2 percent of the overall 37 percent disability employment rate. Medicaid Buy-In programs, rehabilitation outcomes, and federal expenditures were not significantly related to employment outcomes among people with disabilities. Much of the explanatory power in their analysis came from individual-level characteristics including race, gender, and education, among others. Inconsistencies are no doubt a function of the data used, analyses employed, measures of disability (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021), and the nature of the benefits being considered. But they are also a function of underlying assumptions about the benefits-employment relationship, whose, as Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) themselves admit, ‘‘net theorized effects are ambiguous.’’ What is lacking is stronger, more formal sociological insight on how systems of benefits built into liberal welfare regimes have adverse and opposite effects on labor market participation and economic wellbeing among people with disabilities (Parish, Rose, and Andrews 2009; She and Livermore 2007). Benefit programs may provide access to vital disability-related supports, such as wheelchairs, hospital visits, medications, and attendant care, which many private insurers do not offer, while also providing cash transfers in small amounts, driving individuals into a ‘‘poverty trap’’ in order to receive lifesustaining supports and services (Stapleton et al. 2006). Low-income thresholds tied to employment-based income supports may also keep people in lower-paying jobs because a higher-paying job would throw someone off benefits (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020; Kaye 2009). This means they would potentially earn less in a better-paying jobwith no income supports than they would from having a lower-paying job with income supports. It also raises the importance of examining broader structural economic inequalities that extend beyond work. Inherently sociological, such analyses must consider the broader social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts that contribute to longterm economic marginalization. Disability, a community among others with a long and often problematic relationship with the development of liberal welfare regimes, has been especially affected by neoliberal shifts in social policy over the last forty years. Eroding social safety nets and a shift toward ‘‘personal responsibility’’ (Hacker 2006; McCloud and Dwyer 2011; Sherry 2014) have placed an economically vulnerable group in an even more precarious position where they are less able to weather financial hardships. These political and institutional shifts are playing out in many countries. In Canada, for example, people from historically disadvantaged groups experience significant barriers in accessing financial products, including credit to help build assets (Campbell and Kaufman 2006; Conley 1999; Shamsuddin and DeVoretz 1998; Zhang 2003). Maroto and Pettinicchio (2020) analyzed data from the Canadian Survey of Financial Security, a recurring survey that draws from tax filings to ascertain net worth, debt, and assets, finding that households that include members with disabilities have far fewer non-home assets. The negative relationship between disability and wealth was strengthened when including the already negative effects of employment, given low employment rates and earnings among people with disabilities. Sociological analyses can provide important insights into how inequalities and disadvantages in multiple areas of life compound and accumulate. Economic disadvantage is not only tied to labor markets, but is also linked to accessing credit markets, building assets, and interacting with often complex, disjointed, and, in some cases, perverse systems of government supports and benefits that perpetuate inequality and economic marginalization. This also includes pre-labor market disadvantage, inequality, and discrimination, including in education, which has important implications for cumulative economic disadvantage (Shuey and Jovic 2013; Shuey and Willson 2022; U.S. Department of Labor 2014).

B. The “Grids” and Disability by Algorithm As noted earlier, the second way (in addition to the “listings” approach) to qualify for disability is by demonstrating a qualifying reduced “residual functional capacity.”75 The RFC process requires a complex evaluation of a claimant’s age, educational level, and other factors in determining whether a claimant can return to other jobs. While the process requires the same basic evidence as the “listings” approach—submission of medical information, work history data, etc.—the formula for determining eligibility is more convoluted. Yet it is ultimately an algorithmic decision—using the same inflexible bright-line approach as the listings. In this way the grids are a misguided attempt to incorporate social model of disability-related ideas into the SSA system. To make the decision of who will receive thousands of dollars in benefits each year and who will not, the SSA relies on “Grids,” a set of tables created by the SSA.76 These tables contain the following columns: “Rule,” “Age,” “Education,” “Previous work experience,” and “Decision.”77 These tables provide a deterministic approach to justice: the ALJ merely decides which “box” a claimant falls into and makes the decision accordingly. For instance, Rule 202.10 describes a claimant with the following profile: age defined as “closely approaching advanced age” (considered to be ages 50-54); education defined as “limited or less—at least literate and able to communicate in English;” and previous work experience defined as “unskilled or none.”78 Under these circumstances, an ALJ is instructed to find the claimant “not disabled.” There is no room for negotiation, case law, or other arguments: the claimant is simply determined “not disabled” as a matter of law.79 This rigid approach is combined with broad discretion for ALJs hearing appeals, who have authority to weigh hearing evidence. Under either the “listings” or RFC approach, the ALJ retains broad discretion to disregard a worker’s own treating physician—especially with the elimination of the “treating physician” rule in March 2017.80 For instance, a worker may submit a letter or evaluation written by her own primary care physician supportive of a finding of disability. An ALJ may view this letter with skepticism, given that a long-term patient-physician relationship means the doctor may have an incentive to exaggerate a patient’s disability. However, presuming the competency and agency of people with disabilities, the doctor may simply be responding to the patient’s own, deliberate exaggeration. Exaggerating or “masquerading” one’s disability has been conceptualized in the disability community as a way to reclaim a stigmatized turn of phrase. For comparison, there has been similar discussion of the decision by some members of the LGBTQ community to reclaim “queen,” “queer,” “dyke,” and other words.81 Some disabled people seek to continue this movement by making use of a cane, walker, or other stigmatized device, into a point of pride that can be strategically used to push against ableist systems, structures, laws, and policies.82 Masquerading disability allows people to claim their identity and agency—even in systems that require that they pass as nondisabled in order to be positioned as fully human (and in this case, fully employable.)83 Just as the determinism of the “Grids” works against claimants, so too does the procedural complexity of appeal hearings. The evidentiary record in a case routinely spans several hundred pages of medical records. These documents may include inscrutable hand-written doctors’ notes, medical jargon, private details from surgeries, and therapist notes. However, the ALJ has no duty to explain the evidence in simple terms to the claimant. While the judge is expected to make a decision on the basis of all the medically appropriate evidence before her or him, there is also no duty of the judge to develop the record beyond what is present. The hearing process can involve supposedly impartial expert testimony from “vocational experts” or “medical experts,” whom the judges work with frequently but whom the claimant almost surely does not know.84 In some senses, these “experts” may work to mitigate the alleged improper influence of a patient’s primary care physician discussed above.85

(Andrew - B.A. in history from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Studies from the University of Virginia, has 22 years experience in nonprofit disability services and advocacy, “Ableist Narratives That Poison Disability Policy And Disabled People’s Lives,” 27 Dec. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewpulrang/2019/12/27/ableist-narratives-that-poison-disability-policy-and-disabled-peoples-lives/?sh=7b19b48c37eb)

Just a few weeks before Christmas, word started to come out that the Trump Administration is proposing to change how Social Security reassesses the ongoing eligibility of Social Security Disability Insurance recipients. The goal is to reduce SSDI rolls by identifying people on SSDI who shouldn’t be … people believed to be likely to “get better,” or people who otherwise should be working. Whatever the specifics of the proposal, and regardless of its actual effects if it is adopted, the effort is largely driven by widespread belief in a specific narrative about disability … that disability benefits cheating and abuse is widespread, and that that thousands, maybe millions of people with a variety of physical or mental conditions don’t actually deserve the benefits and accommodations meant for “real” disabled people. Like many ableist stereotypes and narratives like this, there are small kernels of truth here. SSDI payments did go up, during and just after the Great Recession, suggesting that there may actually be more to some disability determinations than just medical facts. However, this narrative pre-existed the recent rise in SSDI, and this ableist story apparently continues to thrive, even though SSDI rolls have since gone down. If it ever was a crisis, it isn’t a crisis now. Yet, the narrative lives on. And in the United Kingdom, a similar story and ideology of “benefits scroungers” has driven over ten years of the most stigmatizing and damaging policies faced by people with disabilities anywhere in the industrialized world. One of the key ways to combat any prejudice is to be able to identify specific prejudicial acts and beliefs when you see them in real life. Ableism is more than negative stereotypes or blanket assessments of disabled people’s character or habits. It is also a collection of shared narratives … or stories … made up of fleeting personal encounters, misapplied value judgments, and lightly substantiated rumors … all of which coalesce into what people “know” about disability and disabled people. What follows are descriptions of four of the most common ableist narratives of disability. To be clear, the statements and examples are meant to illustrate common ableist stereotypes, not approve them. These are faulty, harmful ideas. 1. Fakers A lot of people who claim to be “disabled” really aren’t. They use the ambiguity of certain medical or mental conditions to steal benefits and accommodations meant for “really” disabled people. Examples: The most common story is that people in high-poverty areas who can’t find work end up going on disability because they also happen to have chronic pain or long-term illnesses that might not prevent them from working, but can be used to get them on permanent benefits. People with mental health problems like anxiety and PTSD are believed to use these fluid diagnoses to get financial benefits, or other accommodations like being allowed to take emotional support animals anywhere they want. And then there’s a real favorite … people who park in accessible (“handicapped”) parking spaces, but sure don’t look disabled. The effect on disabled people: Anyone who uses any disability-related benefit or accommodation is subject to shaming or attack by people, institutions, or bureaucracies convinced we are cynically on the make, playing the system. This constantly deters people from using benefits and accommodations that could make their lives easier and more productive. And it keeps those of us who do use benefits in constant danger of having them taken away, based largely on an ideologically-driven stereotype. 2. Lazy Some disabled people aren’t interested in working hard or improving themselves. Instead, they use their disabilities as an excuse for laziness or failure, and expect others to take care of them. Or, if a person does work hard and succeeds, then they can’t really be disabled. Examples: Some disabled people just don’t listen when people recommend new treatments, therapies, and coping strategies that might help them. We are supposed to devote our lives to getting better. Others of us apparently make no effort to find work, or try to become less dependent on benefits. And our efforts to conserve our limited stamina and work more efficiently are frequently mistaken for inactivity and laziness. This all builds the narrative that disabled people are lazy and complacent. The effect on disabled people: Many of us actually push ourselves too hard, partly to counter this laziness narrative. Meanwhile, those of us with less obvious disabilities often find ourselves restraining ourselves for fear of undermining acceptance of our very real disabilities and needs. 3. Irrational Disabled people don’t understand their own situations and are less capable of evaluating problems rationally. They may be dishonest, and some lack the cognitive ability or simply the self-awareness and objectivity to make sound decisions for themselves. Examples: This is a particularly acute and long-standing problem for autistic people, and people with traumatic brain injury or intellectual disabilities like Down Syndrome. It is also one of the most harmful forms of ableism applied to people with mental illness. But people with all kinds of disabilities are frequently treated as incompetent, unable to accurately explain ourselves, or dishonest … not to be trusted. The effect on disabled people: In critical, life and death matters like medical care and police interactions, plus higher education, counseling, and finances, we are not fully believed or trusted. To borrow a literary term, we are viewed as “unreliable narrators” of our own stories. 4. Angry A certain kind of disabled person is always angry, regardless of their actual situation. They are angry about their disabilities and their other misfortune. They blame everyone and everything else for their problems. And nothing is ever good enough. Examples: Disability activists never say anything good about anything, and seem to have a complaint for literally every situation. Disaled medical patients and service recipients show no gratitude for the help they get, and have only complaints. This narrative depends on an opposite stereotype, an admired narrative of the disabled person who is always cheerful, appreciative, and good-humored. The effect on disabled people: Many of us feel we can’t ever complain. And when we do advocate we feel less freedom to show our real feelings. This also provides a reliable dodge for anyone or any organization that wants to avoid dealing with disability advocacy concerns. Very real, difficult problems of access and disability justice can be efficiently avoided by casting disability activists as “bitter, angry cripples.” Like all stereotypes, these narratives may ring true for some people in some situations. There are people who fake disability outright, or manipulate actual disabilities to gain perceived advantages. Some disabled people do have trouble calibrating their anger, or objectively assessing their own circumstances and making logical decisions. Some disabled people are lazy, unreliable, self-centered, or untruthful. But like all stereotypes, these are vast exaggerations when applied to all disabled people, or to certain categories of disabled people. They are also qualities shared by millions of non-disabled people. They are characteristics of human beings. And as already demonstrated, these stereotypical narratives harm all people with disabilities in concrete ways that go far beyond hurt feelings. It should also be noted that these narratives are often compounded by overlapping narratives of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Disabled people of color, disabled women, and disabled gay, lesbian, nonbinary, or transgender people contend every day with a web of intersecting stereotypes that together pose additional barriers to equality, opportunity, and access … not to mention basic respect and safety. Before we judge disabled people individually, or make disability policy affecting millions, we should at least be aware of the disability narratives that mislead and deceive us. Stereotypes of disability are common enough to be easily identified, if we just look. And facing them squarely is the first step to eliminating them and making decisions fairly, logically ... based on facts, not rumor and toxic ableism.

Social Security and Social Death As Maxine suggested, disabled people often experience a negative feedback loop between how much society values disabled people and how they are treated (Cacho, 2012). Many participants brought up their perceptions of how they were viewed by society at large, and how this impacted and was influenced by the poverty conditions inherent in in their experiences of SSA policy. Cacho (2012) argues that through social and state-sanctioned processes, some groups of people - particularly poor, criminalized, and racialized communities, are rendered ineligible for personhood, their rightlessness is validated and naturalized, and thus they experience a social death. Cacho’s scholarship on social death continued to come to mind as I listened to participants grapple with their destitution, their sense of stuckness, and the contrast between the lives they lived and the stereotypes and stigmas they encountered as disabled adults receiving SSI/DI. An exchange with Reese exemplified how the concept of social death was evoked in these interviews despite the lack of any prompting questions in the interview guide: Interviewer: Do you have something you consider your biggest concern financially? Reese: Well, overwhelmed with shit I owe, but that’s still—I feel I’ve gotten to a pretty good space right now in terms of I know where to go to get the cheap food. I know where to go to get free produce. I’ve become incredibly resourceful based on a lot of things. Interviewer: Can you tell me a little about those strategies? Reese: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you mean knowing where to go to get the produce, stuff like that? Interviewer: Yeah, in having a tight budget, how you manage to still survive. Reese: Good question. I don’t know if I was surviving this time. I mean, maybe I had a pulse, but I don’t think I was surviving. I don’t know. I don’t really know how to explain that descriptor, you know what I mean? Interviewer: Uh-huh. Like you weren’t dead but you weren’t alive? Reese: Yeah. Reese referenced a sense of feeling lifeless while still being technically alive, suggesting that the term “survival” ascribed more life than they actually experienced. Cacho (2012) argues that in the setting of American neoliberalism, people’s value is assessed through a capitalist and economic lens in which people who do not contribute to the labor market are devalued. This logic is affirmed by many aspects of SSA policy; including the bifurcation of disability benefit programs into SSI and SSDI, in which people who have not paid payroll taxes prior to becoming disabled are funneled into SSI, a program with even more limiting guidelines than SSDI. For people who were disabled since birth, their participation in SSI is all but destined by the time of their infancy, for the sole reason of their inevitable exclusion from the labor market. As is the case among other oppressed groups, such as undocumented immigrants, people receiving SSI/DI benefits have significant legal restrictions on their ability to work with high stakes consequences if they are caught working. Yet, since they still need to eat, this dynamic inevitably leads to working in underground economies which render them at risk of being exploited, underpaid, or abused due to lack of regulation and workers’ precarious and rightless statuses. Later in the same interview, Reese discussed the underground economies they had engaged in to make ends meet while receiving SSI and used similar language suggesting their sense of their own marginal existence: I mean, it has been more stable but still incredibly stressful because of the sort of, kind of—I feel like the world of hustling you have to do when you are at that low income is like so pushed underground that even, literally, like with statistics, it’ll be, like, you are 300 plus below the poverty line—not even below the poverty line; you’re 300 percent plus below the poverty line. It’s like you don’t exist, you know, so, like, a lot of our lives, I’d say, a lot of us are pushed underground to do a lot of different things. Reese describes a different sphere, or “world,” in which their poverty and available work opportunities are so extreme that they seem to disappear from the mainstream world, existing so far outside of social processes and laws that “it’s like you don’t exist.” In this way, the significant amount of work that people do to first access work and then engage in the actual labor meant that many participants were very hard workers. Yet, despite policy that forces them into risky and underpaid work, disabled people are often most stigmatized for their lack of work and contribution to society. Stevie voiced her concern over this dynamic and how it reinforced the devaluation of disabled working-age adults: Sometimes I feel like everybody thinks like, oh well you just like being disabled. Like I even had somebody say, oh, it must be nice to be disabled. You guys just sit at home and collect the check. Okay: One, no, it's not [laughs]. And don't act like the check we collect is like a million bucks. It's like bare necessities, dude. But the fact that society feels that way - it's maddening to me and makes me sadder too, because it's like how am I gonna get this across not only to the people that made the law, when you can't even convince mainstream society that you're worth a piece of shit, you know what I'm saying? Everybody in society is like, ‘Oh, you're disabled.’ Like they just kind of discount you. The minute they say disabled, you could just see it on their face. Stevie recounted a common stereotype of disabled adults, that they are somehow profiting off of disability checks and that they are not working and therefore lazy and worthless. She also connected the fact that the general public has this perception with the political reality that lawmakers seem to be driven by these misconceptions, showing the linkage of devaluation and poor treatment of disabled people in social policy. Several other participants discussed a similar frustration with how they are perceived, and how different it was from their actual experiences of hard work and poverty. The notion that disabled people are somehow gaining an unfair edge on society from their social position, such as in the receipt of SSI/DI benefits, is widely explored in disability studies literature on the “disability con.” First coined by Samuels (2014) and later applied to the SSI/DI application experience by Dorfman (2019), the disability con refers to fear of disability deception among fantasies that disability is a tangible, observable, feature of humanity that can be regulated, with fakers and the truly disabled clearly demarcated and classified as such. Participants in the study encountered fears of the disability con in the many benefit systems they navigated, constantly having to produce evidence, receipts, and their own deference to maintain access to benefits. As if constantly on the defensive, many participants would introduce damaging societal beliefs that they were subjected to in order to present their alternative views of reality. Victoria expressed her frustration with the perception that disabled people get something for nothing, not only harmful for their stigmatizing effects but also for the denial of her reality in the daily bureaucratic grind: I'm not somebody who's looking for a free ride. Never was. You know, there are people who have a perception of those of us on benefits as, ‘Oh, yeah, they just -- I wish I could get paid for doing nothing.’ Like, yeah, live in our world for about 30 seconds and then talk to me about that. I don't think those people would last a day. Adding an important caveat to the protestation that people on SSI/DI do in fact work, Reese reminded me that the neoliberal value of assigning worth based on work productivity was in itself reductive: Because there’s only one type of way to be productive in society and contribute, and that is by working a job that pays a paycheck into a certain thing. Plenty of people contribute work and aren’t compensated. There’s plenty of different types of work that aren’t valued and respected as work but they’re still working. Many participants were actively engaged in their communities in a number of ways from doing community organizing, to volunteering at their churches, to making art, and engaging in public education campaigns. Many were also engaged with each other in disability community spaces, as will be discussed further in Chapter 6. Reese claims a seat at the table along with other prominent critical disability studies scholars in critiquing an overemphasis on access to the workforce without questioning the currency with which neoliberal value is accrued. Yet, many SSA policies operate under the assumption that in order to promote work amongst SSI/DI beneficiaries, beneficiaries must be assessed for desire to participate in the workforce and then aided on an individual basis to rejoin it. The Ticket To Work program, analyzed in this lens, is antithetical to the national labor market and the mixed economy welfare state. Several participants spoke about their experiences on SSI/DI with a similar skepticism of the possibility of truly supporting disabled people when operating within a capitalist system. Often in these conversations, the line between biological death and social death was blurred as participants questioned the motives beyond programs as restrictive as SSI/DI. Sam discussed the slow application process and the fact that disabled people often spent years without income or health insurance while they submitted appeals to the SSA: It's like that Audre Lorde quote, ‘we were never meant to survive,’ you know? And so I felt like I was up against a system that truly benefits by me not surviving. You know, if I don't survive while I'm on Social Security, they no longer have to make a payment. If I die before I get a Social Security decision, they don't have to make a payment. Sam’s concerns about the impacts of lengthy application periods are supported by research that suggests that longer wait times are correlated with lower income, likelihood of being uninsured, and increased medical issues (Coe et al., 2013; Prenovitz, 2020). Sam, like other participants, perceived the SSA as using a ruthless and utilitarian approach to disability benefits. Their experiences with SSA involved such denial of personhood, that the leap to assuming that the system did not care if they lived or died was not a large one. Participants who brought up these concerns tended to be people who were engaged in activism of any sort and who had evidently spent time seeking to understand why SSI/DI programs operated as they did. Tili was among these participants and clearly explicated why she saw SSA in a eugenic framework: I guess I just want to say that it’s clear to me and all of the disabled people I’m friends with and who rely on Social Security as their main means of income, it’s incredibly difficult to be approved for this benefit. People die during the waiting process. They make it incredibly hard to be approved. If you do get approved, they make it incredibly hard for you to be able to live on the amount of money, poverty wages. It keeps people trapped in poverty and it’s a way of slowly killing people, and I do know disabled people who have died waiting to be approved for Social Security. I know people who have died because they needed to turn to survival work while they were receiving their benefits. The system was designed, I think, to kill people. We deserve better. Tili’s perceptions of SSI/DI reveal a complete lack of trust - not only in SSI/DI as programs, but in the motives of the SSA itself. The fact that several participants used explicit language of death or murder to describe their view of these programs, and that none of these observations were prompted by explicit questions, was striking. It suggests that the cumulative effects of navigating SSI/DI policies, interacting with street-level bureaucrats, and playing the game with multiple public bureaucracies, which are all features of the Social Security model of disability, take a significant psychic toll on beneficiaries. While there has been little research to date on the nature of psychosocial impacts of SSI/DI on beneficiaries, existing critical disability studies frameworks and theorizing on the disability experience through the perspectives of capitalism and the labor market align with participants' accounts of feeling invisible and devalued (Longmore, 2003; Puar, 2017; Russell, 2019). Conclusion The findings described in this chapter are an important empirical contribution that show how oppressive social security policy coupled with administrative burden can result in undesirable shifts in individuals’ life trajectories; sense of self; experience of stigma, role in society; and experience of social devaluation. Taken together, these experiences make up the Social Security model of disability. Through personal and community experience, knowledge of the literature base, and theorizing, participants have portrayed the “economic violence” wrought on those excluded from the labor market as a form of state-sponsored debilitation, akin to Social Darwinism (Russell, 2019). The psychosocial sequelae of living on social security disability benefits are important to consider in exploring the beneficiary experience as they characterize the quality and nature of life that people experience as they make ends meet. Participants’ experiences also highlighted out SSA policy that devalues disabled people influences negative societal perceptions of them in a process akin to Cacho’s (2012) social death. This negative feedback lops can have an iterative effect on disability policy and disabled people’s relationships and sense of themselves. Lipsky describes a segment of this process in his discussion of the moderating effect of street-level bureaucrats: In another sense, in delivering policy, street-level bureaucrats make decisions about people that affect their life chances. To designate or treat someone as a welfare recipient, a juvenile delinquent, or a higher achiever affects the relationships of others to that person and also affects the person’s self-evaluation. Thus begins (or continues) the social process that we infer accounts for so many self-fulfilling prophecies (2010, p. 9). Considering these ripple effects, it is not surprising that social policy defining disability in contradistinction to engagement in the workforce could lead to negative social- and selfevaluations of disabled people in a capitalist labor market. Still, the motivation for policy change to improve disabled people’s material lives and disrupt the “benefits trap” only grows when considering the psychosocial and societal effects sequelae of current policy that might shift, in turn.

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

Subminimum Wages and Sheltered Workshops One of the most severe forms of labor market marginalization, exclusion, and inequality among people with disabilities comes from sheltered workshops and assignment of subminimum wages. Not only is the practice detrimental to already vulnerable workers, but it directly challenges decades-long efforts by the disability-rights movement and rights policies to dismantle labor market inequality. Although important opportunities exist to bring the discussion of subpar wages among disabled workers into the growing social science research on minimum wage, few scholars in the area have done so. Growing discussions about raising the minimum wage, promoting living wages, and supporting the working poor have expanded the focus of social scientists interested in the impacts of subminimum wages on a host of socioeconomic outcomes. But disabled people remain largely absent from sociological investigations of subminimum wages and low-wage work more generally, even though there is a long history of legally sanctioned subminimum wages for this group. Subminimum wages and sheltered workshops grew out of the American welfare state as an effort to get disabled people into jobs, no matter what those jobs were. Instead of addressing structural and attitudinal barriers in the mainstream labor market, legislators focused on creating a separate system that would provide workers with disabilities menial jobs and limited earnings. Even with a singular focus on increasing employment rates among people with disabilities, vocational rehabilitation policies further relied on sheltered workshops paying subminimum wages. As rights entered the political fray, activists, welfare professionals, and policy-makers began to question the unequal and contradictory outcomes produced by this system (Power and Marinelli 1974; Whittaker 2005). Today, about 200,000 Americans receive Department of Labor (DOL) waivers permitting subminimum wages, often clustered in certain regions and sectors of the labor market (Friedman 2019). But these waivers account for only one segment of subminimum wage workers. In addition to policy-sponsored programs that allow subminimum wages to some groups, practices like so-called ‘‘wage theft’’ amount to paying workers below the minimum wage (Haley-Lock 2012; Azar 2003; Lambert 2008; Bernhardt, Spiller, and Polson 2013; Clemens and Strain 2020). These practices are common in the low-wage sector where many disabled workers are clustered. The assignment of subminimum wages, especially to already vulnerable and marginalized groups like people with disabilities, signals to employers and others more broadly that disabled people’s labor is worth less than that of those without disabilities. The segregation of disabled workers in competitive employment into low-wage and precarious jobs highlights structural and attitudinal dimensions of work that allude to a much more complicated (and sociologically interesting) relationship between disability and the labor market. Occupational Segregation Policies like the ADA interact with supplyand- demand factors to shape employment outcomes. The ADA did not outline how exactly it would contend with things like the lack of job skills and training, human capital, or a desire for flexible jobs on the one hand or employer preferences and demands and occupational norms on the other. Earlier work ignored how the ADA addresses these other institutional and organizational layers shaping labor market outcomes. Over the last decade, a growing body of work at the intersection of sociology and economics has emphasized how these factors shape persistent marginalization and inequality among disabled workers. One key understudied area is occupational segregation—the clustering of people with disabilities into precarious, low-paying, non-union jobs. Based on an analysis of 30,000 employers, Schur and colleagues (2009) found that workers with disabilities were more likely to work in low-wage, low-skilled jobs, have lower earnings, experience lower levels of job satisfaction, and have less job security. They were also less likely to be involved in job and department decisions, were less likely to be promoted, were more closely supervised, and had lower levels of training than workers without disabilities. More recent work by Schur and Kruse (2022) confirms these findings. People with disabilities are unequally distributed across industries and occupations, but surprisingly little is known about how this occupational segregation is related to supply-and-demand explanations about disability labor market outcomes or how it is shaped by the interaction between occupational characteristics and the nature of disability (Domzal, Houtenville, and Sharma 2008). Several studies have focused exclusively on public sector (namely government) workers (Lewis and Allee 1992; Robert and Harlan 2006) but have not systematically explored how disability type is distributed across occupational sectors more generally. Yet labor market scholars have generally suspected that people with disabilities are more likely to be in government jobs, manufacturing and service jobs, and manual labor (Hale, Hayghe, and McNeil 1998; Jones 2008; Smith and Twomey 2002).Workerswith disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities, aremore likely to be in entry-level jobs requiring low levels of experience (Kaye 2009). Using a 2011 ACS sample of 1,071,314 working-age adults, Maroto and Pettinicchio (2014a) systematically analyzed the distribution of people with different disabilities across 24 major occupations and 15 major industry sectors. They calculated measures of dissimilarity and isolation (Massey and Denton 1988). The former captures the concentration of disabled workers in occupations and the latter measures the chances that a person with a disability shares a job or sector with another person with a disability. They found that while segregation based on race and gender is more prominent than for disability, occupational segregation varied significantly by type of disability. Generally, people with disabilities are underrepresented in management, business, and science occupations, among the highestearning sectors, and overrepresented in clerical, service, and food preparation occupations, among the lowest-paying jobs (subsequent studies have found similar clustering; see Houtenville and Kalargyrou 2015 and Kumin and Schoenbrodt 2016). For example, one of the most common occupations for people with cognitive disabilities was food preparation, where the average annual earnings were only $18,168. People with disabilities were more likely to experience ‘‘tokenism’’—being the only person with a disability in their workplace. Tokenism is especially common for individuals with selfcare, ambulatory, and cognitive disabilities. An important opportunity exists to bring sociological work on status characteristics, queueing, and statistical discrimination theories to explain occupational segregation as both a result of and contributor to discriminatory practices and their underpinnings in negative beliefs about disability and work. When workers with disabilities remain confined to certain areas of the labor market, it reinforces the notion that these are the only jobs they can do. Conversely, as Wilgosh and Skaret (1987) explained years ago, prior experience in hiring people with disabilities goes a long way in dispelling myths and fostering more positive attitudes and greater likelihood of further hiring people with disabilities. Wider research implications from disability-based occupational segregation speak directly to the relationships between employer demands, expectations, beliefs, and norms about work and workers. They add to the sociological focus on the growing polarization between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ jobs (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson 2000) and how marginalized communities are especially affected as they tend to be in low-paying, non-unionized, precarious employment.

Work rendered invisible through sociolegal mechanisms is devalued because it is excluded from legal definitions of ‘employment’ and is therefore not monitored and regulated by the state as such. Three broad types of labour can be characterized as made invisible through sociolegal mechanisms: work that is legally deemed to be non- economic, illegal or otherwise unregulated (see Figure 1).2 Of course, the types of labour that are made invisible through these mechanisms depend on the particular sociolegal environment. For instance, while prostitution is illegal in most of the USA and would therefore be classified as sociolegally invisible work in this typology, it is legal in many other countries and would thus not be classified as such – unless, of course, it was unregulated labour. The first subcategory of sociolegally invisible work is composed of the wide variety of labour that is deemed to be ‘noneconomic’ – that is, workers who are legally characterized as not working for wages but for some other reason. In the USA, this category includes community volunteers who are legally characterized as working for their ‘own advantage’ (US Department of Labor (DOL), 2014), graduate students and student athletes who are legally defined as ‘primarily students’ rather than ‘workers’ (National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 2004; but see NLRB, 2014), disabled workers, unpaid interns and workfare workers who are legally deemed to be receiving job training and work experience rather than performing labour at their worksites (Goldberg, 2007; Krinsky, 2007; NDRN, 2011; US DOL, 2010) and prisoners who are legally characterized as gaining ‘rehabilitation and job training’ rather than working for their prisons and the companies that subcontract their labour (Harker v. State Use Industries, 1993: 133; also see Zatz, 2008). Because these employment relationships are legally construed as ‘noneconomic’, such workers are not defined as covered ‘employees’ by most employment laws – including the US federal minimum wage – and can therefore be unpaid or minimally paid, which directly results in the economic devaluation of their labour. Furthermore, these types of labour are largely not included in official employment data. In its definition of the labour force, for example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics does not include those who are attending school (student athletes, graduate students and sometimes interns), those who are confined to institutions (prisoners), those who are officially unemployed (workfare workers) and those who are not working for pay (unpaid household workers, unpaid interns, workfare workers and volunteers) (Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2011). Thus, these categories of labour are not recognized as ‘work’ in government data and its many resultant analyses of US employment. The two other categories of sociolegally invisible work are illicit and informal labour. Illicit work involves any type of illegal economic activity, such as illegal sex work, drug deal- ing and other ‘black market’ transactions, while informal labour includes any unregulated ‘off the books’ work, such as waste picking, street vending, day labour and often home-based work (Duck, 2016; Grant, 2014; Leonard, 1998; Purser, in press). Unlike ‘noneconomic’ work, illicit and informal work are recognized as economic in nature; yet, because they are not regulated by the state as economic activity – but instead as criminal or unauthorized activ- ity – the consequences are similar: they are largely unprotected by employment laws and uncounted in official employment data.3 As a consequence, there is little systematic knowl- edge of these types of labour, including their working conditions and economic impact (but see ILO, 2012; Nightingale and Wandner, 2011). Indeed, aside from a limited understanding gleaned from individual case studies, their contours as work remain largely unknown. For many of these types of labour, sociolegal mechanisms of invisibility intersect with – and are often compounded by – other mechanisms of invisibility. For instance, some types of sociolegally invisible work are also devalued by sociocultural mechanisms. Such is the case for volunteer work, care work and sex work, in which hegemonic gender ideologies obscure the fact that labour is being performed and lend legitimacy to their exclusion from legal definitions of ‘employment’. Likewise, some categories of sociolegally invisible work are sociospatially invisible as well, as they are also devalued because they are segregated from socially constructed worksites, whether in private homes (e.g. paid and unpaid domestic labour, informal home-based work and sex work) or formal institutions (e.g. disabled labour in sheltered workshops and incarcerated labour in prisons). In fact, in many such cases, the labour’s sociospatial invisibility has served as justification for their legal exclusion.

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

Sociological theories of discrimination suggest that employer attitudes and behaviors play an important role in creating obstacles for people with disabilities at various stages in the labor market. It became clear to some American policy-makers long ago that in order for disability-rights legislation to reach its fullest potential, it had to contend with more than structural barriers. As former member of Congress Tony Coelho noted in a 1997 President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities conference report, ‘‘although innovative programs, actual job opportunities, and federal and local laws are still needed, employer attitudes are now the main obstacle for people with disabilities in the employment arena.’’ Part of the demand-side explanation for poor labor market outcomes among people with disabilities rests with faulty assumptions and misperceptions about productivity and costly accommodations (Kaye, Jans, and Jones 2011; Stein 2003; Unger 2002; Schwochau and Blanck 2000). This has important consequences for delayed labor market entry. Employers believe workers with disabilities are incapable of performing the work required for the job, are less productive than those without disabilities, take longer to learn and complete tasks, require expensive accommodations, will not get along with customers, clients, and coworkers, and will have to take numerous sick days (Chan et al. 2010). Similarly, Livermore (2011) found that the combination of stigma, negative attitudes of employers and colleagues, and structural barriers such as inadequate transportation and supports at work played a substantial role in the ability of people with disabilities to find and maintain stable employment. Even after obtaining gainful employment, individuals with disabilities may be isolated or ignored by coworkers and supervisors, resulting in feeling rejected and devalued or feeling like outsiders in the workplace (Robert and Harlan 2006). Additionally, workers with disabilities may be incorrectly labeled as lazy, incapable, or childlike solely because of their disabilities. As a result, coworkers and supervisors may treat workers with disabilities as if they were incompetent or helpless. Workers with disabilities also experience harassment at work, including ‘‘joking, needling, kidding, name-calling, mimicry, innuendo, rumors, rudeness, sabotage, inappropriate questioning, and insensitive remarks’’ (Robert and Harlan 2006:612). This disability-specific workplace discrimination is not only tolerated but encouraged by the practices and policies of large bureaucratic organizations. Further, as Robert and Harlan note, workplace disability discrimination leads to ‘‘actionable outcomes such as job segregation, low rates of promotion and reasonable accommodation, and a hostile work environment’’ (2006:602). Likewise, although reasonable accommodations are the chief policy mechanism for people with disabilities to maintain gainful employment, the limited studies of the issue indicate significant resistance on the part of employers. For instance, in their earlier work, Harlan and Robert (1998) found that employers engage in resistance strategies to discourage workers with disabilities from requesting accommodations. These strategies include denying employees a disability identity and using employees’ lack of knowledge of the ADA to their advantage. In particular, employers were reluctant to recognize disability; some implied that workers were merely ‘‘acting disabled’’ to receive special treatment. Consequently, employees feared that disclosing their disability might have negative consequences. This affects employment and earnings because, as Konrad et al. (2013) find, workers with disabilities who reported receiving accommodations had higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of discrimination.

(Steven - Ph.D. student, Centre for Disability Studies University of Leeds, “Access to work or liberation from work? Disabled people, autonomy, and post-work politics,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 4.2, 2015, https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/212/398)

One notable dissenter from this view within UKdisability discourse was the late Paul Abberley, who from 1996 to 2002 progressively elaborated the argument that ‘classical social theories’ – in which he included Marxism – were fundamentally inadequate as the intellectual basis of a liberation politics of disability because of their focus on work as constitutive of an essential human identity and as an essential requirement for full membership of society (Abberley. 1996; 2002). Abberley shared with his contemporaries (such as Finkelstein and Oliver) the starting point of a Marxist-influenced historical analysis of the origins of disablement in its modern forms. Thus, he did not seek to “deny that the origins of our oppression, even for those with jobs, lie in our historical exclusion, as a group, from access to work, nor... to oppose campaigns for increasing access to employment” (Abberley 1996, pp. 76–77).Instead, he sought to “point out that a thoroughgoing materialist analysis of disablement today must recognise that full integration of impaired people in social production can never constitute the future to which we as a movement aspire” (Abberley 1996, p. 77). Abberley argued that “even in a society which did make profound and genuine attempts to integrate impaired people into the world of work, some would still be excluded by their impairment”vii and that “a society may be willing, and in certain circumstances become eager, to absorb a portion of its impaired population into the workforce, yet this can have the effect of maintaining and perhaps intensifying its exclusion of the remainder” (1996, p. 71). Therefore “an inclusion which is dependent upon employment is by no means advantageous to all disabled people, since it is not likely in modern labour markets that all disabled people could find or reliably retain employment” (Abberley, 2002, p. 134). The truth of these statements is evident in the many portrayals in mainstream British news media of disabled people who do manage to succeed in the world of employment, with an implicit (and sometimes explicit) message that all disabled people are therefore capable of being employed, and thus that anyone who claims that they are genuinely unable to work (either due to impairment or disablement) must be lying or faking, and therefore a member of the ‘undeserving poor’, subject to vilification as the folk devil of the ‘scrounger’ (Garthwaite, 2011). Abberley (1996) further argued that the “work -based model of social membership and identity” is inextricably linked to ‘cure ’- oriented medical model approaches to disabled people, implying a “value judgement upon the undesirability of impaired modes of being” (p.74), and ultimately implying that disablement can only be fully overcome by eradicating impairment itself. Thus a truly liberatory, social model approach to overcoming disability must “reject work as crucially definitional of social membership and [be] sceptical about some of the progressive imperatives implicit in modern science” (Abberley, 2002, p. 135). In his final version of his argument, Abberley specifically – and presciently – warns against “the over-enthusiastic espousal of work-based programmes for overcoming the exclusion of disabled people which leave welfare systems unchanged or, worse still, depleted” (Abberley, 2002, pp. 135–6). More recently, Canadian disabled activist and writer A.J. Withers makes a similar criticism of the UPIAS stance on work and benefits, describing their position as “highly problematic on pragmatic grounds” (Withers, 2012, p. 89) because, regardless of whether disabled people are theoretically capable of paid work in a more accessible and less discriminatory society, in currently existing capitalism they are systematically discriminated against by employers, and therefore many have no choice but to rely on state benefits for their basic needs. Withers (2012) goes on to argue, echoing Abberley, that an exclusive campaign focus on “participation in paid employment (i.e., participation within the capitalist system)...continues to perpetuate the capitalist value that people’s worth is connected to their productivity and participation in paid employment” (p. 90, emphasis in original).

{mosads}Possible models for a basic income vary, including payments conditional on certain behaviors, payments only when other income falls below a certain level, and an unconditional monthly payment to everyone. But common to all of these models is a lack of attention to how people with disabilities would fare.

In the United States, people with disabilities are already eligible for a basic income of sorts. They receive government benefits for which they do not have to work, either Social Security Disability (SSDI) and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and remain eligible as long as they are disabled. However, there are serious downsides to the existing disability benefits system which could, in theory, be solved with a basic income.

On Monday, Yang finally released his , with a section on people with disabilities. I read it. I also read his book, The War on Normal People, combed his website on details about disability programs, and asked his campaign for comment. And as a disabled person who has relied on various social safety net programs in the past, I am still left confused as to how disability benefits would be affected by the centerpiece of Yang’s policies, , or what he calls the Freedom Dividend. His health care policies for disabled people also raise more questions than answers.

How Yang’s Freedom Dividend affects disability benefits

Disabled people could be disadvantaged with the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Scotland, a leading disabled persons organisation has warned. Inclusion Scotland said that disabled people are not being adequately included in the debate over the way UBI takes shape. The charity fears that the scheme, while sounding “utopian”, does not take into consideration the costs associated with living with a disability and might not work alongside the current system of disability benefits. UBI is a scheme that could soon be trialled by the Scottish Government that would see small monthly cash payments given to everyone without means-testing. It is meant to act as a “floor” to income to stop people living in poverty. Four councils in Scotland are currently planning to trial UBI. In a discussion paper on the scheme, the charity argues that disabled people should be entitled to a larger amount of UBI to help cover the costs that come with living with a disability. But the charity says that disabled peoples’ needs are being treated as matters of “additional complexity” rather than realities that should be taken into consideration from the outset. Susie Fitton, Policy Officer for Inclusion Scotland said: “Disabled people in Scotland have been hardest hit by austerity measures and welfare reforms through cuts to the inter-related social security payments and public services they depend upon. “In this context, a utopian vision where poverty is eliminated by a UBI, where everyone has a secure income, and unpaid work such as caring responsibilities are valued on a par with paid work is potentially very attractive to disabled Scots. “However, we find that discussions about UBI often fail to involve disabled people, and therefore to address key issues, such as how a UBI would meet extra costs related to disability. “Disabled people are currently subjected to a never-ending series of intrusive, inadequate, inaccurate, and degrading assessments to receive disability benefits and would love to see these scrapped. “However, the argument that a UBI would remove the need for assessments may be illusory.

Most advocates of Universal Basic Income (UBI) understand UBI as a transformative and liberating reform of income security. Many potential benefits have been identified: increased exercise of citizenship rights and responsibilities, personal liberation, the fulfilment of moral and ethical ideals, and many others (Duffy 2016a: 39; Raventós 2007; Torry 2015, 2016). So it may seem surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to the potential benefits (or risks) that UBI creates for disabled people. Here we will argue that this is a twofold error and that not only has UBI much to offer disabled people, but also that the movement for Independent Living, led by disabled people, has much to teach the UBI movement. There is a tendency in discussions of UBI to treat the needs of disabled people, and any necessary reforms of disability benefits in the light of UBI, as a matter of additional complexity, to which attention must be paid at some future date (Torry 2013: 266). Of course, no advocate of UBI excludes disabled people from receiving UBI, but by treating the reform of disability benefits as a secondary problem it may appear that the needs of disabled people are not addressed by UBI or that they are somehow less important. It is our contention that the needs of disabled people should be central to discussions of UBI, and the question of how to adapt UBI for disabled people should be addressed as a matter of urgency (Elder-Woodward and Duffy 2018). We have adopted the term Basic Income Plus (UBI+) to describe Most advocates of Universal Basic Income (UBI) understand UBI as a transformative and liberating reform of income security. Many potential benefits have been identified: increased exercise of citizenship rights and responsibilities, personal liberation, the fulfilment of moral and ethical ideals, and many others (Duffy 2016a: 39; Raventós 2007; Torry 2015, 2016 This model raises a number of further questions that would also need to be explored; but for the purposes of this article we are going to assume: The extra income supplements would be introduced in accordance with the spirit of UBI, that is it ‘ … unconditionally has three aspects. First there would be no income conditions, that is no means testing … Second there would be no spending conditions … Third there would be no behavioural conditions, requiring people to behave in certain ways and not others … ’ (Standing 2017: 6). There would still need to be some kind of assessment or claim process for the additional elements. This process should be designed with disabled people to be empowering and respectful. Obviously, this would be radically different from the medical and professionalised models of assessment currently being used. However, within the limits of this article, we want to focus on three questions: What are the potential benefits of UBI+ to disabled people? 2. Why do some disability leaders reject the idea of UBI? 3. What strategy, if any, could reconcile these different movements for social justice? The Benefits of UBI+ The most obvious benefit of UBI for disabled people is that it reduces poverty and is also associated with a wide range of wider benefits including: better mental and physical health, reduced domestic violence, increased IQ and better educational outcomes (Standing 2017; Torry 2015). All disabled people would benefit from these changes, but given that they are more likely to be in poverty than other groups, then they would tend to benefit more than most from these improvements (Elwan 1999). The second benefit of UBI for disabled people is that it would eliminate a chronic insecurity built into most welfare systems. For instance, many systems of income security, like the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) in the UK, are organised so that the whole of your income is dependent on proving the negative impact of your impairment on your ability to work. This assessment process is inherently negative and stressful (Saffer et al. 2018). But this stress is made even worse by the fact that if you feel you have been wrongly assessed and you try to challenge their assessment then you will not be put onto a lower benefit. Instead you will be treated as if you are entitled to nothing until your challenge reaches the tribunal. There is also an in-built delay, often of several months, while the benefit agency ‘reconsiders’ your claim before a case can go to tribunal. To receive any income you must borrow from friends and relatives during the wait, or beg for food from the growing number of charitable ‘foodbanks’ (Garthwaite 2016). It is not clear yet how people who have failed disability tests will be treated under the UK’s new system of Universal Credit (UC), but the situation looks likely to be even worse, since you might also lose the housing element of UC during a dispute. Even if you are successful under the UC, you may need to wait six weeks or more to get your first payment. So UBI+ would radically increase income security because the core UBI element of a cash grant would be received automatically, whatever the result of your disability assessment. This is not just a technical change, for the intrinsic purpose of UBI is to overturn the strangely illiberal assumptions of neoliberalism: that people lack social rights and that it is the job of the state to direct and control citizens for the sake of an economic system which benefits the betteroff. In the UK these illiberal assumptions have led to a welfare reform agenda which has deployed a dubious ‘biopsychosocial’ assessment of disability developed by medical practitioners (Waddell and Aylward 2005). Their theories on and practices of assessment led to the UK Government’s Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and a harmful Work Programme (Hale 2014; Shakespeare et al. 2017; Stewart 2018). The WCA has also led to increased levels of suicide and mental illness (Barr et al. 2015). Instead of all this, UBI+ starts from a foundation of human rights and a commitment to support the freedom and security of everyone, whatever their impairment. The third benefit of UBI+ is that it radically removes the poverty-traps caused by means-testing and conditionality, and enables people to do paid work on terms that make sense to the individual. Many disabled people can and want to carry out paid work; but they cannot necessarily work in exactly the same way as other people. For example, people with chronic illness may go through prolonged periods of incapacity; yet may also be able to do periods of paid work when they have adequate energy levels (Hale 2018: 11). Of course, opportunities for paid work also will depend on employers or customers; but UBI increases the ability to negotiate reasonable accommodations, while maintaining reasonable incentives. You will never be made worse off by taking paid work and you will be taxed on your new earnings at the same rate as other citizens; no longer will you have to pay an effective tax rate close to or, sometimes even exceeding 100% (Duffy and Dalrymple 2014). Fourthly, UBI+ helps achieve a long-standing objective of the Disabled People’s Independent Living movement (hereafter referred to as the Movement), by establishing a universal system for funding care or support – what is sometimes called individualised funding or personal budgets. There has been important progress in disability rights in shifting control over service funding into the hands of disabled people (Duffy 2018a). However, these systems are often complex and unreliable, often applying multiple criteria for eligibility as well as means-testing. The recent development of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia follows an international trend towards shifting power and control towards disabled people, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the demands of disabled people and families (Duffy 2013). However, this trend often faces resistance from the bureaucracies and other interests that it threatens. Often, funding remains controlled or constrained and people are unable to use it as they see fit (Duffy 2012). In some countries (like the UK and the USA), funding for disability support is also severely means-tested (Coalition on Charging 2008). But, by including personal budgets within the UBI+ model, it becomes easier to both increase personal control over support and to end the application of means-testing to disability support services. The fifth benefit of UBI+ is political. Disabled people would share a common cause with all other citizens in ensuring that the base UBI level was set at the highest feasible level. Advocates of UBI, those fighting poverty and inequality, would have an important ally in the Movement if these causes were clearly linked by a common framework. Currently this is not the case, for disability-related benefits are disconnected from unemployment benefits and there is no advantage to disabled people from increases in unemployment benefit, and no advantage to unemployed people from increases in disability benefit. Worse, not only are the economic interests of these two groups disconnected, both are also subject to separate prejudice and scapegoating while this can also further undermine the alliances necessary to advance social justice. In the UK, as neoliberalism has advanced, there have been increasing efforts to apply judgmental concepts based on meritocratic assumptions, such as labelling the poor as an ‘underclass’ and treating them as less than human. Television coverage of the lives of people using and abusing welfare services has only led to their greater vilification by the general population (Esmark and Schoop 2017). It is not surprising that many disabled people want to distance themselves from these stigmatised groups. At the same time, the UK has also seen a rise in hate crime directed against disabled people, often on the presumption that people are faking their disability to claim extra benefits. This has been widely promoted by the right-wing media (Roulstone and Mason-Bish 2013). So, while some fear that disabled people are faking their disability to gain unjustified advantages; some disabled people fear they must prove their incapacity to work to make sure they are not mistaken for the unemployed or the poor. Mutual suspicion is a poor basis for coherent social action and resistance to injustice. The Fear of UBI It is a mistake to treat disabled people as a homogeneous group. There are many different disability groups, categorised by different impairments or by different histories of resistance to injustice. There are many people who might be defined as a person with a disability by others, but who do not identify themselves in this way, or who would identify themselves by some other aspects of identity, such as their faith, politics or place. However, there is a line of argument strongly critical of UBI which can be identified with an important strand within the Movement, and which has been clearly expressed by several of its leaders. A particularly strong and clear case, which brings together a number of key themes, has been made by the UK campaigning organisation Disabled People Against the Cuts (known as DPAC) and we will use this argument as our primary source for outlining importance resistance to UBI (DPAC 2018). The disabled people who lead the Movement are not alone in noticing that UBI is supported by both opponents of neoliberalism and by some of its advocates. This gives rise to multiple fears, including: that the UBI level will be too low; that it will function as a subsidy to employers; that it will lead to diminished employment rights or that it will be funded by cutting other essential services. There is a particular fear that UBI will be funded by cutting disability benefits, services, provisions and the regulations that support disabled people to be equal citizens within society at large. As DPAC state ‘ … a welcome mat for the introduction of a UBI legitimises the neoliberal agenda of undermining social provision, increasing the rate of exploitation and disregarding the needs of disabled people’ (DPAC 2019: 5). The second criticism of UBI is that it is utopian and that feasible models of UBI would not be sufficiently generous to reduce poverty, while an appropriate/acceptable level of UBI could not be afforded without excessive tax increases. Here DPAC cites research by Martinelli and his claim: ‘The unavoidable reality is that such schemes either have unacceptable distributional consequences or they simply cost too much’ (Martinelli 2017: i). There is of course an interesting tension between the first claim, that UBI is compatible with neoliberalism and the second claim, that UBI requires a higher level of progressive taxation than is politically feasible. However, it is certainly fair for DPAC to observe that some advocates of UBI trade on its compatibility with both right-wing and left-wing agendas; and it is also true that advocates of UBI are often vague about the level of UBI they think reasonable, as well as the form of taxation that would fund it. There is here an important lesson. In the era of neoliberalism, policies that please the centre and which pander to current assumptions are unlikely to win support from those, like disabled people, who are suffering most from the injustices caused by the current constellation of regressive forces and cuts to social programs. So, in the context of these ongoing experiences of marginalisation and oppression, it is not surprising that DPAC is very concerned that the World Bank’s recent advocacy of UBI is closely linked to its desire to create a different kind of workforce where employers can offer less security because social systems are designed to provide the necessary platform of income security. The World Bank states, ‘Changes in the nature of work caused by technology shift the pattern of demanding workers’ benefits from employers to directly demanding welfare benefits from the state. These changes raise questions about the ongoing relevance of current labour laws’ (World Bank 2019: 27). For disabled people the idea that employers should be supported to reduce employment rights is deeply problematic. Reducing the obligations on employers does not seem progressive nor helpful to the disabled people’s independent living movement. As DPAC puts it: As a reform for labour, it is not as good as the demand for a job for all who need it at a living wage; or reducing the working week while maintaining wages; or providing decent pensions; or making full reasonable adjustments for disabled workers including guaranteeing sick pay and disability leave. These are demands that we need to be putting loudly here and now alongside calling for full and unconditional support for those of us unable to work (DPAC 2019: 24). to reduce poverty, while an appropriate/acceptable level of UBI could not be afforded without excessive tax increases. Here DPAC cites research by Martinelli and his claim: ‘The unavoidable reality is that such schemes either have unacceptable distributional consequences or they simply cost too much’ (Martinelli 2017: i). There is of course an interesting tension between the first claim, that UBI is compatible with neoliberalism and the second claim, that UBI requires a higher level of progressive taxation than is politically feasible. However, it is certainly fair for DPAC to observe that some advocates of UBI trade on its compatibility with both right-wing and left-wing agendas; and it is also true that advocates of UBI are often vague about the level of UBI they think reasonable, as well as the form of taxation that would fund it. There is here an important lesson. In the era of neoliberalism, policies that please the centre and which pander to current assumptions are unlikely to win support from those, like disabled people, who are suffering most from the injustices caused by the current constellation of regressive forces and cuts to social programs. So, in the context of these ongoing experiences of marginalisation and oppression, it is not surprising that DPAC is very concerned that the World Bank’s recent advocacy of UBI is closely linked to its desire to create a different kind of workforce where employers can offer less security because social systems are designed to provide the necessary platform of income security. The World Bank states, ‘Changes in the nature of work caused by technology shift the pattern of demanding workers’ benefits from employers to directly demanding welfare benefits from the state. These changes raise questions about the ongoing relevance of current labour laws’ (World Bank 2019: 27). For disabled people the idea that employers should be supported to reduce employment rights is deeply problematic. Reducing the obligations on employers does not seem progressive nor helpful to the disabled people’s independent living movement. As DPAC puts it: As a reform for labour, it is not as good as the demand for a job for all who need it at a living wage; or reducing the working week while maintaining wages; or providing decent pensions; or making full reasonable adjustments for disabled workers including guaranteeing sick pay and disability leave. These are demands that we need to be putting loudly here and now alongside calling for full and unconditional support for those of us unable to work (DPAC 2019: 24). aligned to ‘being employed’ in the paid labour force, that is being in a contractual master–servant relationship with an organisation or individual who then directs our work in return for some limited material rewards, then social justice will focus on extending the social and material benefits of employment to more people, including the disabled. However, if we do not accept that this is how the value of one’s own life should be defined then we will want to explore strategies that support people being fulfilled in alternative ways and to ensure that when engaged in paid labour we are free to negotiate the most meaningful forms of work. We are at a crossroads and we face a choice between a capitalist or a human conception of life’s social value (Lyons 2019). Interestingly, the DPAC article assumes that UBI should be seen as a subsidy to employers, who can thereby reduce the net costs of employment; whereas many advocates of UBI tend to see it as a to guarantee to the potential employee that they will now be able afford to negotiate a better contract of work which is meaningful and dignified, because it is possible to turn down bad work. This hinges on whether the level of UBI is adequate and whether it actually enables people to avoid poverty. For disabled people there is likely to be a significant tension between two groups: On the one hand there are those who know that, with suitable adaptations and strong legal protections, they and many of their demographic can flourish in paid employment, and that they will benefit from the status and resources it conveys, within the current neoliberal framework. On the other hand some will see those kinds of jobs as neither attractive nor feasible; however, they know that they can make a vital contribution to community life through caring for people, or for the commons, through civic and political action or through artistic endeavour. It is this second group of disabled (and non-disabled) people who may be more attracted to the possibilities created by UBI. Finally, another critical theme that runs through the DPAC critique is the danger that UBI does not address the urgent needs facing disabled people today. The final section of the DPAC article makes clear a hope that the UK might be on the cusp of a more radical change in direction in policy, ideology and power. They state: Britain is currently home to the biggest socialist movement in Europe where demands for a living wage, for health and social care support services free at the point of need and a social security system that provides an adequate standard of living free from conditionality are all popular. These are what we need to fight for, not opening the door to policies that will be used to maintain existing power inequalities, facilitate greater job insecurity and low wages and risk further public service cuts (DPAC 2019: 26). Of course it might be said, particularly given the extremity of austerity in the UK and the failure to date in overturning the current neoliberal political consensus, that this is simply a different kind of utopianism. However, the matter is important and reflects an important difference between two groups. Advocates of UBI often seem to approach the issue from an academic perspective, outlining models or trying to persuade politicians and policy-makers. Streetlevel campaigning is growing, but it is very recent. But for disabled people issues of reduced income security, cuts in public services, and loss of employment rights are issues that demand urgent attention today, not further academic study. If this analysis is broadly accurate then it suggests that it will take significant work and dialogue to connect these two movements. Our view is that this is worth doing for multiple reasons, but it must begin by finding every opportunity to debate these alternative perspectives and to explore whether there might not be practical policy innovations that could create common ground. As one American disabled writer argues: People with disabilities and those who live, work with, and support them need urgently to educate ourselves about what a basic income is and what it could mean for us. We must begin to take part in the conversation now, to ensure that if a basic income does become a reality, it does so in a way that benefits people with disabilities, rather than leaving them even more vulnerable than they currently are (Harper 2017). One very obvious area for potential collaboration is in the development of UBI pilots or policy that would enable us to test the idea of UBI+, for there is a good case that such pilots or policy changes to existing disability benefits would be both feasible and potentially liberating (UBI Lab 2019). For many, existing disability benefits could be converted into a form of UBI+ simply by: • Ending work conditions. • Ending income-testing and the clawing-back of earnings. If this analysis is broadly accurate then it suggests that it will take significant work and dialogue to connect these two movements. Our view is that this is worth doing for multiple reasons, but it must begin by finding every opportunity to debate these alternative perspectives and to explore whether there might not be practical policy innovations that could create common ground. As one American disabled writer argues: People with disabilities and those who live, work with, and support them need urgently to educate ourselves about what a basic income is and what it could mean for us. We must begin to take part in the conversation now, to ensure that if a basic income does become a reality, it does so in a way that benefits people with disabilities, rather than leaving them even more vulnerable than they currently are (Harper 2017). One very obvious area for potential collaboration is in the development of UBI pilots or policy that would enable us to test the idea of UBI+, for there is a good case that such pilots or policy changes to existing disability benefits would be both feasible and potentially liberating (UBI Lab 2019). For many, existing disability benefits could be converted into a form of UBI+ simply by: • Ending work conditions. • Ending income-testing and the clawing-back of earnings. Ending rules that limit entitlements for people in families. This is not such an outrageous or utopian idea. For example in the UK, the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and its replacement, the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), already meet these criteria. Further, as Jennifer Mays explains, blind people in Australia have a pension which is equivalent to an approximate UBI+. This has been highly beneficial in enabling the inclusion of blind Australians in community life (Mays 2016). Reforms of this nature would turn disabled people into trailblazers for UBI and would enable empirical research on the individual and social benefits of a more empowering system. Secondly, advocates of UBI need to recognise, and communicate clearly, that UBI is not a panacea for solving every social problem nor for meeting every vital need. Every distinct social good has its own distinct properties and logic. For example, healthcare services cannot be organised according to the same principles as UBI, as the need for healthcare varies individually. The same is true for education, housing and many other aspects of our shared community life. We need both universal income and universal public services and there should be no need to choose between then (Duffy 2018b). Unless advocates of UBI are clear about these caveats, then they cannot expect to ease the fears of persistently disadvantaged groups such as disabled people. Basic income is not, and never can be, a suitable replacement for universal healthcare. Instead, for any meaningful alliance to be built around UBI, it will be essential that all sides are committed to the welfare state as a whole and to extending its emancipatory role. UBI must be seen to play an appropriate role within the whole welfare state, which includes measures to open up opportunities for all and to bar prejudice and discrimination. In fact this is exactly what mainstream advocates of UBI propose, and no serious advocate of social justice is likely to believe that UBI is an alternative to universal education, healthcare or other vital services (De Wispelaere 2015: 20). Of course, in the wrong hands, any idea can be used badly. For an extreme example, Hitler exploited the idea of a national health service to advance eugenic policies (Office of United States Chief of Counsel For Prosecution of Axis Criminality 1946: 175). But this is not an argument against a national health service, instead it is an argument for ensuring that all such system are democratically accountable and run according to human-rights principles. Advocacy for basic income needs to be built on a positive and progressive account of the purpose of the welfare state. Currently the welfare state is too often understood negatively, as merely a form of insurance or as a safety mechanism, to ensure basic needs are met. However, this is not the positive purpose envisioned by advocates of Independent Living nor by many advocates of UBI. In fact advocates of Independent Living have a well-established account of the purpose of the welfare state, which is rooted in the experience of disabled people and their battle for liberation from control and diminished social status. The key to forging an alliance between the Movement and advocates of basic income may be to examine more deeply the idea of Independent Living. Independent Living is a philosophy which Jenny Morris defines using four principles: 1. All human life is of value. 2. Anyone, whatever their impairment, is capable of exerting choice 3. People who are considered disabled by society reaction to physical, intellectual and sensory impairment and to emotional distress have the right to assert control over their lives. 4. Disabled people have the right to participate fully in society; to take control; and be responsible for the outcome of our action (Morris 1993). In our view it would benefit the UBI movement to adopt this vision and to see the fight for UBI as part of an effort to build an emancipatory welfare state. It is not enough to think in terms of meeting needs, instead we need to see the purpose of the welfare state as being to empower potential. The possibility of connecting these different progressive quests – to achieve UBI and to ensure collective empowerment – depends on rethinking some of our assumptions about how the economy functions and what counts as a socially valuable contribution. The capitalist version of social value – use by others for financial reward – seems unlikely to be the basis for the liberation or emancipation for anyone, and particularly for many disabled people. Building a society of equals requires establishing a conception of citizenship which is inclusive and within which everyone’s unique gifts can flourish, and where money and power are not used to determine human worth (Duffy 2016b: 27). Australia is in an interesting position to work on the relationship between UBI and the rights of disabled people. The development of the Every Australian Counts campaign was an important national innovation where disabled people and families worked with professional groups to define a new universalist vision for disability rights (Galbally 2016). Campaigners successfully engaged the general public by enabling them to see that disability rights were not separate rights for separate people, but instead they were part of a universal system of social security for all. There remain enormous challenges to turn the aspirations of this campaign into meaningful reforms. There is no doubt that the progress made thus far has been significant and, most importantly, that the ongoing pressure exerted by disabled people and families has kept human rights at the forefront of public debate. The battle for UBI (and UBI+) would benefit from similar attention to the Every Australian Counts campaign to developing a wider public understanding of the core ideas, the social choices ahead, and the many different groups that might benefit. But the battle for Independent Living in Australia (and elsewhere) may also benefit from converting the individualised funding that is currently being deployed by complex bureaucratic systems (like the The National Disability Insurance Agency) into a genuine entitlement and the rightful property of disabled people themselves (Duffy, 2013). UBI is a technical and political system for redistributing money directly to citizens. There are many good reasons to believe that such a system could have many positive impacts in terms of advancing human rights and reducing inequality. However, it is how it is implemented, and the beliefs and practices of those who implement it that will determine what it will actually achieve. Any system can be used well, or badly; and it is unwise to have faith in any technical and political system, purely as an end in itself. Independent Living does not just require technological and political change, it is also a philosophy of emancipation and equality. Disabled people, based on their lived experience of resisting oppression, have developed insights into the purpose and meaning of life. They realise that every human being has value and can live a life of meaning, if they have the freedom, resources and support to make this possible. Advocates of UBI would be wise to pay attention to the fears and hopes of disabled people, because disabled people tend to be much more aware of the importance and the perils of the welfare state. Advocates of UBI would be wise to adopt the goal of Independent Living as their own goal and to think clearly how UBI would need to function in practice so that it supports the rights and inclusion of all disabled people. If they do not, then they cannot expect the support of disabled people in advocating for UBI. Advocates of UBI need to pay more attention to the question of how UBI is understood and implemented unless they are happy to see UBI exploited by those who do not share their commitment to social justice.

(Jennifer Van Aswegen – Doctorate of Education from University of Sheffield and Michael Shevlin – Professor of Education @ Trinity College Dublin, “Disabling discourses and ableist assumptions: Reimagining social justice through education for disabled people through a critical discourse analysis approach,” Policy Futures in Education 17.5, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1478210318817420#bibr27-1478210318817420)

Although studies have shown that there are benefits associated to varying degrees with approaches focused on the supply side of the labour market (), a simplistic social capital enhancement and a supply-side focus does not of itself reduce employment barriers for people with disabilities (). As : 355) points out ‘the provision of skills training may well improve a person’s functioning as an economic actor, but it will not of itself enhance his/her capacity to choose how he/she lives or to achieve happiness’. In fact, supply-side interventions are reproved as the ‘very opposite of what is needed’ for disabled people, serving to ‘reinforce, rather than undermine, the traditional assumption that disabled workers are somehow not equal to non-disabled peers’ (: 4). The very fact that this policy is a standalone specialist policy for disabled people situated alongside its able-bodied counterparts Action Plan for Jobs() and Pathways to Work() is evidence of the twin track approach to mainstreaming, where disabled people are seen as requiring a specialised strategy that is built on a charitable model of the ‘deserving poor’. Policies from this framework of thinking focus on ensuring that citizens do not become a burden on the welfare system by enhancing their productive potential and their labour market readiness – in other words, their human capital potential. Underpinning this perspective is the wider ideological commitment to the marketisation of education – a managerialist perspective that is preoccupied with maximising economic output and individual self-sufficiency, rather than enhancing human capabilities. : 295–296) himself has been critical of the misappropriation with and conflation of human capital to the concept of human capabilities. The use of the concept of ‘human capital’, which concentrates on only one part of the picture (an important part), relayed to broadening the account of ‘productive resources’, is certainly an enriching move. But it does need supplementation. This is because human beings are not merely means of production, but also the end of the exercise. Similarly, Dean et al. argue, ‘skills and knowledge that may be exploited in the labour market are not the same things as human capabilities’ (2005: 9). Valued knowledge Embedded within the human capital paradigm is a new code of values underlying what constitutes valuable knowledge – and from this perspective, market knowledge trumps all other forms. The lack of critical sociological and philosophical research in Ireland, as noted by Lynch, has resulted in impoverished discourses that are scientifically misinformed and frequently inaccurate, and a policy arena where ‘disciplines and fields of study that are not marketable have lower status and power’ (2014: 9). From a capability perspective, an education that enables people to achieve well-being as well as the exercise of agency, entails the promotion of functionings and capabilities relating to abilities and knowledge that enable them to participate in dominant social frameworks (). Education should not be construed merely as the provider of technical skills, but equally as the empowerment of the person through critical thinking and imagination (). However, the Irish State’s directive is evident: increase the skills base in strategic growth areas in order to create and attract more business and investment; in other words, ‘teach what can be sold’ (). An alternative discourse Ivan Illich once famously stated ‘If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story’ (cited in : 2). In seeking an alternative to neoliberal human capital discourse, a capabilities approach provides a framework for new ways of thinking alongside ‘an underpinning ideological narrative from which policy development can flow’ (: 352). A capabilities approach has the potential to emphasise the ethical aspects of inclusion because it embraces an understanding of difference as a specific variable of human diversity; equally, it understands human dignity as the development of capabilities. From this perspective, there is no tolerance for disabling/ableist discourses or the unequal treatment of individuals. makes this clear, stressing that a capabilities approach must be concerned with the impact of deeply embedded social injustice and inequality, because it is these features that generate capability failures through discrimination or exclusion. Instead of emphasising the specifics of the disabling situation, a capabilities approach shifts the focus to look at establishing equality in terms of possibilities and choices (). A capabilities perspective emphasises that people not only require access to resources and opportunities, but also need to be able to convert these into valuable and valued achievements and goals (). Policies that improve the lot of groups are to be rejected, : 16) argues, unless they deliver the central capabilities to each individual. A capabilities approach puts the onus on government and public policy to overcome structural obstacles in ensuring that all individuals in a society can achieve their capabilities. Concluding comments Although welcomed on the surface by the disabled people’s movement, CES raises serious questions about the framework of thinking that guides the development of inclusive policies and practices for disabled people in Ireland (). The prioritisation of economic imperatives has greatly impacted on rights of disabled people to exercise agency in relation to their available choices to achieve the forms of inclusion that are highlighted within materialist social models of disability (). As Nussbaum argues ‘we need a counter-theory to challenge these entrenched but misguided theories, if we want to move policy choice in the right direction’ (2011: xi–xii). In response, this study highlights the real potential of a capabilities approach for overcoming the deficient discourses and disablist assumptions in CES in favour of a policy framework that seeks to reconcile personal fulfilment, social inclusion and economic independence for disabled people.

(Fiona Kumari - Professor of Disability and Ableism Studies in the School of Education & Social Work @ University of Dundee, “The violence of technicism: Ableism as humiliation and degrading treatment,” Ableism in Academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education, UCLA Press, 2020, Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xprjr.18)

We do not normally think of inaccessibility as a form of inhumane and degrading treatment. The Price case was a test as to whether inaccessibility came within the remit of Article 3 of the ECHR. Article 3 states that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. This is an absolute right with no exemptions or limitations. The Court is required to take into account all the circumstances of the victim. In The Greek Case (1969) ‘degrading treatment’ is defined as ‘deliberately causing severe suffering, mental or physical’ and ‘inhuman treatment’ that ‘grossly humiliates the […] individual before others or drives him to act against his conscience’. In Tyrer v. the United Kingdom (1978), the European Court of Human Rights stated that it was enough for the victim to be humiliated in his or her eyes and not necessarily in the eyes of others. Inaccessible environments are not benign: they occur through a lack of insight, conditioned by the practices of ableism, into the situation of difference being modelled on the illusory notion of the normative (benchmark) human being. In Price the court concluded that inaccessibility is ipso facto material and ontological violence – a form of degradation and debasement, even if the parties to the action did not intend to violate the psychic and bodily integrity of Price. This is an extraordinary judgment, a radical decision swept under the carpet, through a process of restricting the decisions to only prisons and psychiatric facilities.2 Universities are, however, on notice, as inaccessible environments constitute humiliation and debasement. The European Court of Human Rights reaffirmed the decision in Tyrer (1979) and found that Price’s Article 3 rights had been violated despite the lack of ‘any positive evidence of an intention to humiliate or debase’. Inaccessible relations hurt and as such constitute an assault on beingness and shape our ontological character. Humiliation caused by inaccessibility can lead to low self-esteem, social phobia, anxiety and depression, pointing to a link between humiliation and ableist practices as a form of harm (Hartling and Luchetta 1999; Torres and Bergner 2010). Torres and Bergner (2010) identify four key elements of humiliation on which there is general consensus in the literature, namely • Calling into question a status claim • There is a public failure of the status claim • The degrader has status to degrade, highlighting asymmetrical power relations • There is a rejection of the status to claim a status, that is, a disabled academic is denied recognition of their claim to discrimination There is no room in the chapter to discuss the phenomenon of microaggressions: demeaning implications and other subtle insults against minorities that may be perpetrated against individuals due to gender, race and religious difference, sexual orientation, and disability status (Solorzano 1998). Suffice to say that there is an interconnectivity between microaggressions and humiliation. Relations that read differences as forms of subordination and signs of deficiency produce suffering that humiliates and debases. I have used the term ontoviolence to capture these effects that literally seep into the interior spaces of a ‘cast-out’ person’s beingness (ontological framing), producing instant, longer-term and accumulated effects of defilements of the body and mind. As Guru (2011) reminds us, humiliation always has a context, as does the Convention’s preamble, which understands the production of disability to occur within the context of interactions. Context and responses of technicism within universities towards the disabled academic often mask humiliating practices. Indeed, acts of humiliation are a direct attack on equality measures and run counter to an ethos of celebrating diversity. This is because humiliation is only possible when an individual already possesses a sense of self-determination: it is an assault on the selfrespect of the victim. As Parekh (2011, 23) puts it, disabled academics ‘have a certain view of themselves and the kind of minimum treatment that is due to them. When this is denied and others’ treatment of them falls below their expectations, their self-respect is violated.’ The very existence of a system of equality law raises reasonable expectations on the part of the disabled academic; however, it is the negation of a disabled academic’s experiences – an act of ontoviolence that results in the caustic harm of humiliation. Ableist practices erode confidence in institutional mechanisms to resolve inequalities and are manifested by accumulated experiences of ableist defilements. Interestingly, there is a school of thought that argues that when self-respect and a sense of entitlement are lacking, individuals do not experience of sense of humiliation (Parekh 2011). I am not convinced; internalised ableism means that in order to survive some disabled staff may accept or tune out ableist interactions. Equally, from the perspective of perpetrators, it is difficult to prove intentionality where the norms around the debasing of disability are so insidious and commonplace that they may not even arise as a conscious form of negative intentionality – that is, how institutions respond to disabled people. We may ask whether intentionality matters in the final instance; should we instead be focused on the effects of the ‘event’? One example given by Inckle (2019), a disabled lecturer at the University of Liverpool, in response to a request for reasonable adjustment, illustrates this point: ‘The university might deem it reasonable for you to go downstairs on your bottom in some situations rather than schedule you into fully wheelchair accessible rooms.’ I cannot even fathom a situation whereby the above-mentioned expectation would be considered reasonable. Again, Parekh (2011, 25–6) concludes that ‘humiliation is most effective when it is so deep and pervasive that it is no longer recognised for what it is, but that does not gainsay its reality’. Humiliation can involve some not-so-self-evident ironies: a sense of technicism’s reductio ad absurdum. At my institution there is online diversity training about disability produced by an equality consultancy business that I believe contains certain offensive assumptions and viewpoints about disability, yet in order to comply with equality training protocols, disabled employees are required to complete these packages, to further submit to humiliating practices as part of their employment contracts. Inckle (2019) points to another one of these ironies: her academic department is the School of Law and Social Justice and the vice-chancellor of the university was awarded a damehood on the basis of services to equality. Bringing about complaints means being ushered into processes within the university that further humiliate and silence, where the onus of proof is on the disabled academic to prove the validity of discrimination. This ontoviolence has the effect of sanitising technicist ableism and redirecting attention away from a university’s equality obligations. Ultimately it diminishes the contributions of disabled academics to the intellectual life of universities. This chapter has threaded together the practices of ableism within universities in spotlighting the forms of technicism engaged and weaponised to harm and humiliate disabled academics as they go about their work. It is clear from European case law that inaccessibility is a form of ontoviolence and that there is a direct relationship between accessibility and discrimination.

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

Disability is often ignored in sociological studies of inequality and stratification even though it is a highly stigmatized status characteristic strongly associated with socioeconomic marginalization, exclusion, discrimination, and disadvantage. Disability shapes experiences with economic insecurity and poverty but, historically, it has seldom been the focus (in most cases even tangentially) of sociologists studying economic inequality. Current mainstream sociological literature offers few references to disability as an axis of inequality alongside race, class, and gender (Mauldin 2020, 2022; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2022). To some extent, this deficit has created new interdisciplinary opportunities for a more focused study of disability-based economic inequality. Some of these efforts take place within disability studies, although a great deal more of this work lies at the margins of sociology, economics, health, and public policy. While these provide important insights, there is little direct dialogue between these research agendas—or with the core of their respective disciplines— contributing to a landscape of scattered silos. Rather than a cohesive social science research agenda on disability-based economic inequality, we are left with episodic bursts of scholarship, isolated, if not excluded, by what are considered ‘‘core areas’’ of inquiry, including inequality and stratification. Bringing disability into mainstream sociological work on inequality is mutually beneficial to disability studies and to the discipline of sociology. Sociology offers sophisticated empirical and theoretical tools for understanding institutional, organizational, and attitudinal bases of inequality that can fruitfully be applied to ableism, which is rooted in virtually all social arenas. One such theoretical tool is relational inequality theory (Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019; Acker 2006; Tilly 1999). According to this perspective, disability is associated with low status. This helps legitimize the exploitation of disabled people by those regarded as having higher status and, as such, more resources and power. These exploitative relationships are embedded in a variety of organizations, contributing to the (re)production of inequality (Maroto and Pettinicchio 2022). Disability studies provides perspectives that, in the case of economic inequality, shed light on the material, lived experience of different disabilities visa`- vis socially constructed barriers (see Shandra 2018), contributing to a broader sociology of disablism (Thomas 2007; Shakespeare 2014). The symbiosis between disability studies and sociology provides social scientists the tools necessary to uncover underlying structural and cultural forces at work in maintaining inequality regimes (Aker 2006), as well as the ways in which those inequality regimes are challenged through policy, political mobilization, and collective action (Pettinicchio 2019; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020). There are also important practical reasons for further developing our sociological perspective on disability-based economic inequality. For years, activists, scholars, and policy-makers have noted that employment rates among disabled Americans have been abysmal. In 2019, former President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address touted the ‘‘hottest’’ economy in years, pointing to decreasing unemployment rates not only among Blacks but also among people with disabilities. Trump’s speech implied that we should be proud that more disabled people are in the workforce.1 This language is not unique to Trump. The Clinton administration in the 1990s and, later, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton championed the growth in employment throughout that decade. However, when it comes to people with disabilities, these numbers ignore where they are situated in the labor market, while masking the growing number of discouraged workers who have simply given up looking for a job (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021; Brooks 2019b; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020). Disabled people in the United States and elsewhere are more likely to find themselves in lowpaying, non-unionized, precarious work (Schur and Kruse 2022), which partly explains persistent earnings inequalities, not to mention the many Americans who now count themselves among the working poor, living paycheck to paycheck with little saved. And then there is the COVID-19 pandemic. As scholars focused on social determinants of health remind us, status characteristics like race, class, gender, and disability will have an important impact in how already marginalized and vulnerable groups experience crises like pandemics. Marginalized groups will continue to be disadvantaged if efforts at recovery ignore these groups (Link and Phelan 1999). Throughout the pandemic, social distancing measures and vaccination policies and campaigns, along with economic policies, often ignored or negatively affected people with disabilities (Pettinicchio, Maroto, and Lukk 2021). Importantly, the pandemic has highlighted extant structural inequalities along with policy failures like exclusionary economic supports, barriers to care, and insensitive COVID countermeasures, preventing individuals from falling further into economic destitution. Given what we already know about labor market barriers and financial insecurity among people with disabilities, the economic effects of the pandemic on this group will be dire and long-lasting. Now more than ever, we should be turning to sociological insights about systems of disadvantage. In their application to disability, we should also expect important feedback in further refining those insights, thus making sociology’s contribution to economic inequality stronger. In this paper, we outline and describe key areas of inquiry speaking to the sociology of disability-based economic inequality. In addition to providing a synthesis of sometimes disparate literatures located throughout the social science landscape (but often with key sociological contributions), we also seek to motivate sociological inquiry into the links between rights policy and the organization of work; the relationship between institutional arrangements and norms, values, and attitudes; the intersections of statuses like gender, class, race, and disability and what these mean for inequality; and the way systems of inequality are challenged by individuals and organizations. We begin by situating disability and work within a broader social policy context. We do this because alleged ‘‘policy failures’’ motivated much writing on disability and employment throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Getting people with disabilities into the labor market has had a lengthy history intertwined with the development of the American welfare state, as in other liberal regimes. It also sheds light on the perversion of these intentions and rising conflict with the burgeoning civil rights frame in the 1970s, highlighting both structural and attitudinal barriers in challenging disability based economic inequality. We then turn to empirical aspects of social science research on disability and the labor market. We focus our review on work that seeks to make sense of socioeconomic declines in the wake of landmark disability rights and antidiscrimination legislation and then delve deeper into the structure of the labor market itself. This literature points to how occupational segregation, marginalization, and oppression in the labor market go a long way in explaining negative economic outcomes. But employment is not the only dimension of disability-based economic inequality. Poverty and financial insecurity extend beyond employment (or lack thereof)—an issue on which sociologists are well poised to speak. Throughout, we link structural and institutional dimensions to attitudinal considerations that together create barriers to financial security. In this vein, we show how the intersection of disability with gender, class, and race shape economic disadvantage, and we point to the important interplay between sociology, feminist scholarship, and disability studies in shedding light on disabilitybased economic inequality. In our conclusion, we return to the important role of sociological inquiry, both theoretical and empirical, in uncovering persistent economic disadvantage and relate this to COVID-19 and the kinds of inequality made more acute by the pandemic that should be of interest to sociologists. Welfare, Rights, and Disadvantage Many countries have enacted antidiscrimination and rights legislation meant to aid people with disabilities, policies often motivated by concerns over unemployment and economic marginalization. For decades, the United States was regarded as a world leader in establishing social welfare provisions and rights legislation aimed at people with disabilities (Pettinicchio 2019). The Republican-led senate in 2012 failed to ratify the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities, even though the Convention ironically echoed the intentions of American policymakers when they enacted the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act decades earlier. But the road to rights is rather long, and the implications for understanding employment insecurity and economic disadvantage more generally are not straightforward. Disability social policy is imbued with certain values fetishizing work as a form of social integration and independence from the state that continue to inform how we think more generally about marginalized groups in relation to social welfare and financial security—a topic of inquiry critical to any sociologist interested in structural inequality. ‘‘Independence through Work’’ In the early twentieth century, the solution to getting Americans with disabilities out of asylums and off government benefits was to rehabilitate them into employment. An integral part of America’s early welfare state was vocational rehabilitation, which in 1920 via the Smith-Fess Act extended provisions once reserved for disabled war veterans to all Americans with disabilities. By the middle of the last century, rehabilitation was seen as an American success story. Key mechanisms, including a policy monopoly of rehabilitation professionals, legislators, government bureaucrats, and disability groups of the time—all with stakes in the game—worked to promote, reinforce, and watch over these policies and programs. Their efforts helped to secure expansion and reappropriation despite a political climate where conservatives in both parties in Congress curtailed the expansion of social policy (Pettinicchio 2013, 2017, 2019). Still, many policy-makers believed it was a moral and economic imperative that people with disabilities be employed, regardless of whether jobs were meaningful or provided enough earnings to achieve independence or match one’s actual skills and training. In 1936, the Randolph-Sheppard Act created ‘‘special’’ employment with preference to blind vendors on Federal government property. Although the law is considered an early example of affirmative action, it did not promote integration into mainstream employment. A few years later, the Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act expanded the use of sheltered workshops—supervised workplaces paying subminimum wages through contracts often from government agencies and nonprofit organizations (Whittaker 2005; Bryan 2006). Although several states have banned subminimum wages, this legacy continues today through Section 14(c) certificates that exempt employers from paying people with disabilities minimum wages mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act (Friedman 2019).

III. (LEGAL) ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT DISABILITY IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE This Article contrasts two prominent ways of thinking about disability: the medical model and social model. These two models rely on fundamentally different assumptions about people with disabilities. The medical model frames disability as an individual defect, or deficit, in need of diagnosis, treatment, and remediation.16 Under the medical model, a person with cerebral palsy is understood to be inherently limited by the physical demands of her condition, as compared to a “normal” body. Society has traditionally relied on this model, and indeed many people may consider this model the only way to think of disability. First developed in the field of disability studies,17 the social model conceptualizes disability as constructed in the environment, rather than in the individual.18 The social model recognizes a person with cerebral palsy is limited not by her body, but by places or institutions that are not designed to be accessible. The social model thus develops a more relational and holistic theory of disability, focused on the person, not the problem. The social model of disability contextualizes medical realities in a social justice framework.19 A person with cerebral palsy really does have differences in a biological sense from a person who does not have cerebral palsy. However, society can choose to make that cerebral palsy a defining aspect of their personality,20 or merely an ancillary one, like brown eyes or dark hair. While many people would chafe in a society where worth was determined by eye color, people with cerebral palsy and other disabilities today face equally arbitrary barriers to social acceptance and survival. The question of differential treatment may be complicated and highly personal for people with disabilities. For instance, some disability rights activists have likened disability to racial identity, noting that some disabled people may want to reclaim their disability and fight against the stigma.21 Others may argue 2020] DISABLING INEQUITY 151 that disabled people should not be treated differently from able-bodied people in any way, regardless of the intentions behind differential treatment. Indeed, not everyone with a disability is proud to be disabled.22 The social model of disability roots disability identity in repeated experiences with inaccessible rules, policies, and structures, rather than medical or biological difference.23 Though there is no biological basis for race,24 being a person of color can become a permeating part of one’s identity because of the constructed norm of whiteness.25 As such, even everyday interactions with white individuals or institutions signal to people of color the various privileges that white people receive at their expense.26 The social model of disability posits a similar experience for people with disabilities. By focusing solely on the physiological nature of disability, the medical model tacitly accepts that society may accommodate some conditions more than others. The social model of disability demands a world designed for all abilities. The social model also argues that when we design environments for everyone, they are improved even for the nondisabled. A pregnant woman may not need a ramp, but it may improve her overall experience accessing a building. Put differently, the medical model is inherently-diminishing, carrying implications of weakness, helplessness, and dependency, precisely because it tends to reduce an entire individual to her impairment,27 while the social model recognizes that there are 152 N.Y.U. REVIEW OF LAW & SOCIAL CHANGE [Vol. 44:145 other aspects to a person’s identity in addition to the diverse ways in which they move. Additionally, the social model emphasizes that the experience of being labeled disabled or abnormal is often more impactful for people with disabilities than biological differences alone.28 For the cafeteria worker, the experience of being labeled disabled and the social stigma of applying for social security disability benefits is likely the source of anger and frustration, rather than the aging body.

In an effort to locate the articles included in this special issue in relation to underlying assumptions related to disability, we believe a brief overview of the commitments of the field of disability studies is useful for readers. The nascent field of interdisciplinary, disability studies is described by the Society for Disability Studies as . . . challeng[ing] the view of disability as an individual deficit or defect that can be remedied solely through medical intervention or rehabilitation by “experts” and other service providers. Rather . . . should explore models and theories that examine social, political, cultural, and economic factors that define disability and help determine personal and collective responses to difference . . . stud[ies] national and international perspectives, policies, literature, culture, and history with an aim of placing current ideas of disability within their broadest possible context and . . . encourag[ing] participation by disabled students and faculty, and ensuring physical and intellectual access. (Society for Disability Studies, n.d.) In this way, disability studies has served to recast disability and disabled identities, while calling for and producing activist oriented scholarship and displaying a commitment to intersectional and layered analyses. We believe that our purposes in bringing together this special issue reflect these commitments, while advancing qualitative methods and methodological possibilities for more deeply understanding how disability is (re)constructed across contexts. We argue that centering (Kerschbaum & Price, 2017) and reclaiming disability (Linton, 1998) is timely for the qualitative research community and serves to directly challenge often taken-for-granted practices, structures, and discourses that have pervaded qualitative work. Indeed, historically qualitative researchers have frequently privileged particular ways of being in the world (e.g., people who use spoken and/or written language), with much of the language produced by research participants being presumed to fall within the confines of expected patterns of ablebodiness. Even in moving disabled individuals from subject/object to participant, research that focuses on insider perspectives of everyday experience has frequently excluded disabled people beyond participation in research about them, and, at times, has been grounded in ableist structures and practices. Consequently, much of the early research surrounding disabled people has been grounded in deficit-based perspectives aimed at “fixing” individual pathology versus working to understand the being of another individual, as well as the social/cultural construct of disability more broadly. There are certainly exceptions to this. For instance, some early, critical special educators advanced qualitative methods as related to disability in ways that advocated for an interpretivist approach to understanding the disability experience (see, for example, Biklen & Duchan, 1994; Bogdan & Taylor, 1976, 1994; Ferguson, Ferguson, & Taylor, 1992). And currently, within the growing field of critical disability studies, researchers are working to expand definitions of ways of being in the world, reframing how they make sense of who should and can participate in and conduct a research study, and how this participation might take place (see Goodley, 2012, 2017). Furthermore, Berger and Lorenz (2015) have contended that there are few, if any, specific disability-methods courses in institutions of higher education—let alone qualitative methods courses with such a focus. Thus, there is a critical need to advance methods and methodological discussions in the human/social sciences beyond being “about disability,” as is seen in the advancement of feminist research methods, as well as in humanities-based disability studies work. We believe that this special issue responds, in a way, to Berger and Lorenz’s (2015) assertion, and, we argue, turns this assertion inside-out, so to speak—to create a space in which disability advances the use of critical qualitative methods and methodologies to more specifically attend to and develop new meanings about disability. In this sense, we are reclaiming disability and, we suggest, that the articles in this special issue advance “ . . . epistemological structures that both generate and reflect current interpretations of disability” (Linton, 1998, p. 10). Indeed, beyond the articles included here, there is a growing body of scholarship that is doing the work of centering and “reclaiming” disability. For example, this centering of disability is exemplified in the work of Kerschbaum and Price (2017). In their manuscript, Centering Disability in Qualitative Interviewing, the authors not only drew from their experiences as disabled researchers interviewing self-identified disabled faculty members, but they also emphasized (“centered”) disability as a “form of embodied experience” that, if assumed, unsettles theoretical and methodological assumptions and uncovers taken-forgranted and normative practices in the traditional, qualitative interview. Similar to Linton’s (1998) and Kerschbaum and Price’s (2017) call to “center” disability, Minich (2016) asserted the primacy of disability and disability studies, not as a field of study, but rather as a methodology, noting methodological concern about the separation of the study of marginalized locations and those who occupy them, as they relate to disability. In his text on critical, qualitative methods and methodologies, Kuntz (2016) relatedly argued that much of qualitative research has become devoid of the recognition of context, power, and material impact and offered . . . an articulated vision for alternative spaces of possibility, places where we might act and be as other than we currently are . . . often such spaces of possibility extend from the recognition that previously legitimated forms of knowing and being (epistemological and ontological assumptions, respectively) misrepresent others’ lived realities. (p. 14) And, it is with a commitment to revisiting, questioning, critiquing, and even resisting “legitimated forms of knowing and being” (Kuntz, 2016, p. 14) that we crafted this special issue. In doing so, we encouraged the contributing authors to not simply describe what is, but consider what could be (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004). Through such a consideration, we suggest that what these articles offer are new and varying “spaces of possibility” (Kuntz, 2016, p. 14)— spaces where disability is centered and reclaimed in qualitative research.