K - Disability - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

K – Disability – CFMLP
Thanks to Maikle, Logan, Charles M, Mark, Rishabh M, and Wyeth for their contributions to this file.
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Background Cards
What is disability
Emerson 22 (Spring 2022. Tyler Christopher Emerson -- Student at Brad College -- Author for Economic Senior Projects (From Brads Digital Commons). “The Job Guarantee as it Relates to People with Disabilities”) //Don Markos
The first task, to define disability, is a challenge in itself due to the sheer magnitude of bodily variation in the human population. In a world without similar patterns of discrimination 10 across the disability community, it would be incoherent to group thousands of unrelated physiological and psychological variations together. For the purposes of this research, there are still some useful systems of organization that are understood in common usage because, while the corporeal experiences of people with disabilities vary greatly, the effects of exclusion due to ableism are experienced quite consistently. According to the World Health Organization, disability has three dimensions based upon the Medical Model of disability: impairment, activity limitation, and participation restrictions (Geneva, 2001). Impairment refers to physiological or mental changes in function (e.g. a broken leg or Alzheimer's). Disabilities can refer to genetic attributes from before and after birth or physiological changes or injuries over the course of life. A disability may also be a static, progressive, or intermittent condition. This is all to say that every person will experience at least temporary disability in their lifetime. It is vital to provide an additional definition for disability as well. While the WHO represents the messaging of the Medical Model of disabilities, Mike Oliver (2004) and other academics represent the Social Model of Disability. The Social Model theorists assert that disability is defined by a culture and the socially constructed barriers that prevent full social inclusion. The idea of disability itself is partially a creation of the capitalist and scientific movements in America. As Wasserman et al. contend, “there were no such concepts [of disability] to attend to until 19th century scientific thinking put variations in human function and form into categories of abnormality and deviance" (2016). Like race or sex, immutable genetic and environmental traits result in socially constructed identities, but in the case of disability there are sometimes functional and material underpinnings to those differences. To understand disability with a little more nuance, some theory can provide insight to the way this population has been regarded over time. As Burch and Sutherland write, before the 11 1980s, the “assessment of disability came almost exclusively from outsiders: educators, doctors, and policy makers. Most adhered to what we now call a Medical Model of disability" (2006). Under this model, the person is pathologized and reduced to a category. The disability is treated as a problem to be remedied. The barrier to opportunities and access in society at large is seen as a result of the disability itself. This model implies that the disability is what causes quality of life variations. This has economic consequences for benefits, too: “The Medical Model appears to support the correction of the biological condition or some form of compensation when that is impractical" (Wasserman et al., 2016). Thus, society bears the cost of not only medical rehabilitation and assistance, but also the systemic costs of exclusion. Curative methodology sees disability as a deficiency to be remedied with professional treatment and assistance. These approaches, by necessity, narrowly envision individual reformation. Unfortunately, these models relegate humans to the role of patient and deviant. This approach deemphasizes and excludes the knowledge and experiences of people with disabilities. In the 1980’s, the Social Model of disability came into favor as a result of changing attitudes and the work of disability activists (Burch and Sutherland, 2006). This model emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the social and economic boundaries placed on individuals because of random genetic factors and diseases (Wasserman et al., 2016). The barriers for full participation are seen as the problem, and removing those obstructions is the primary concern for improving quality of life. Of course, just like race, disabilities are socially recognized categories. Additionally, there are very real, material consequences of medical conditions as demonstrated by the lived experiences of individuals with disabilities. Social limitations also define what is valuable and necessary in the lives of individuals with disabilities. Barriers to the workplace like missing elevators, transportation, or working 12 accommodations are seen as the operative problem, not the physiological or psychological characteristics of people with disabilities. Wasserman et al. note that under this view, “the main reason people with disabilities encounter hardship is because they suffer discrimination along the same lines as racial or ethnic minorities. Accordingly, civil rights protections and anti-discrimination laws are the proper responses to disability" (2016). This is not to compare the struggles of the two communities, in fact this is an intersectional problem; people with disabilities in Black, Indiginous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities face even greater hardship, abuse, and neglect (NDI, 2019). The 1990 ADA in America was a response to those new notions and ideals of inclusivity. The question to ask is whether those laws are materially changing the lives of Americans with disabilities to provide them the same access to life and labor as their non-disabled counterparts. Based on the longitudinal employment data, there are serious grounds to question the economic efficacy of the ADA, at least as it is currently supported by other programs (U.S. BLS, 2013). But, at the same time, there can be no doubt the ADA introduced a radical new era of accessibility to spaces, transportation, and education. Americans with disabilities have a long and complicated relationship with the medical industry and with the Government due to a long list of human rights abuses which have occurred. For example, Liat Ben-Moshe writes on the relationship between the carceral state and disability in American capitalism. Employment metrics in studies around the world demonstrate that there is a connection between economic condition, rates of disability claims, and social wellbeing (Mont, 2014). Disability, like unemployment, can be viewed as a direct result of structural inefficiencies in our models of social organization and the private labor market. Ben-Moshe illustrates that point here: 13 “In the context of capitalism, disability became the category through which people are measured as need based or work based... . Such interpretations dispel the common belief that people with disabilities are not productive under the capitalist system because they do not hold jobs. As Russell suggests, people with disabilities are commodified and deemed profitable, especially when occupying institutional beds. By clever capitalist alchemy, surplus populations are spun into gold. Disability is commodified through this matrix of incarceration (prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, and more).” This is the strange contradiction of disability in American society: though society disproportionately excludes Americans with disabilities from productive life, the healthcare and financial sectors depend on the needs of chronically and acutely ill patients to survive. In a monetary state where we are forced into wage work to earn our place in society and to pay taxes, disability is the logical category for people whose bodily and material circumstances prevent full social participation. Although the ADA on its face changed the legal rights of people with disabilities within certain bounds, our institutions take time to adjust to these new ideas of inclusivity and there must be careful consideration in the necessary steps to take to improve the lives and protect the human rights of people with disabilities.
What is disability studies
Lester and Nusbaum 17 (September 15th 2017. Jessica Nina Lester -- Associate Professor of Inquiry Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Emily Nusabaum -- Ph.D and an Assistant Professor in the EdD Special Education program, focusing on disability and equity at the University of San Francisco. “’Reclaiming’ Disability in Critical Qualitative Research: Introduction to the Special Issue” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077800417727761) //Don Markos
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.
The medical model of disability
Gerst and Schwitzman-Gerst 20 [Andrew Gerst, NYU Law ‘18, RLSC ‘18, is currently the Sinsheimer Fellow at Mobilization for Justice.; Tara Schwitzman-Gerst is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University and an Adjunct Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Elementary and Secondary Education at New Jersey City University. Her current research utilizes Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education (“DisCrit”) to examine how professors at Hispanic Serving Institutions are supporting preservice teachers of Color and teaching about K-12 student diversity.; N.Y.U. REVIEW OF LAW & SOCIAL CHANGE; Vol. 44:145; “DISABLING INEQUITY: HOW THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY RESISTS BARRIERS TO SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY BENEFITS”; https://socialchangenyu.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Gerst-Schwitzman-Gerst_RLSC_Volume44.Issue2_-1.pdf; Accessed 6-23-23]//LASA-mackerel
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

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