Citizenship and Vulnerability: Disability and Issues of Social and Political Engagement

Abstract

Drawing on new empirical research with disabled people in the UK, and considering the work of theorists such as Berlin, Habermas and Mouffe, Ellison's ideas of proactive and defensive engagement and Turner's 'sociology of the body', Beckett proposes a new model of 'active' citizenship that rests upon an understanding of 'vulnerable personhood'.