Key Concerns for Critical Disability Studies

Abstract

The International Journal of Disability and Social Justice is a timely intervention into the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies. Any new initiative, especially in a pre-existing and maturing field of inquiry, should encourage us all to think critically and reflexively about the key questions and issues that we should be grappling with today. This paper offers an inevitably partial take on some of the key concerns that we think scholars, activists and artists of Disability Studies should be engaging with. Everything we do these days takes place in the shadows cast by the global pandemic. While it is important to acknowledge the centrality of COVID-19 – and the threat this poses to the mind-bodies, politics and everyday realities of disabled people – we want to foreground some preoccupations, ideas and debates emerging from within the field of Disability Studies that will have resonance beyond the pandemic. We will begin the paper by offering a perspective on the contemporary nature and state of Disability Studies; suggesting that many of us are Critical Disability Studies thinkers now. Next, in order to narrow the focus of the discussion in this brief paper, we choose one emergent and popular theoretical orientation – posthuman Disability Studies. Then, we introduce and elaborate on four broad concerns that we think we should engage with; desire, alliances, non/humans and their implications for conceptualising social justice. Throughout the paper we will work through some of the power dynamics, questions of accountability and requirements for a generosity of engagement that these concerns provoke.