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Disability and the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights and a call for an International Bureau of Information, 1931

GROCE, Nora
2013

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In Disability Studies the evolution of conceptual models is often portrayed as linear, with a nineteenth-century charity model shifting to the medical model that dominated disability discourse in the twentieth century. This is then assumed to be largely unchallenged until the 1970s, when an emergent Disability Rights Movement re-framed issues into the social model, from which evolved a rights-based model. This paper documents two early efforts to address disability issues submitted to the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights in 1931 and a ‘Memorial’ requesting the establishment of an International Bureau of Information on Crippled Children in 1929. Neither submission achieved its stated goals, yet both reflect early attempts to place disability within wider social contexts.

Moral wrongs, disadvantages, and disability: a critique of critical disability studies

VEHMAS, Simo
WATSON, Nick
2013

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Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS.

Reading the National Disability and Rehabilitation Policy in the light of Foucault’s technologies of power

LESHOTA, Lekholokoe P
2013

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In the area of disability studies, models have been at the centre of debates, influencing social policies, practices and legal frameworks. The former Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in the Kingdom of Lesotho was not an exception. In its efforts to tackle issues of disability, it produced The National Disability and Rehabilitation Policy: Mainstreaming persons with disabilities into society in 2011. This policy document is rooted in the social model and seeks to address long-standing problems and challenges of people with disabilities in the Kingdom. Using ideas from Foucault, particularly the technologies and regimes of power, which work through language and practice, this article examined ways in which people with disabilities are constituted through state knowledge and government policies, and concluded that these constructions form the basis for alienation and marginalisation in society.

Political liberalism and the justice claims of the disabled: a reconciliation

BADANO, Gabriele
2013

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Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due concern for the disabled while upholding political liberalism. To achieve this aim, a revision of the basic ideas of persons and society is proposed. The idea of persons should be regarded as more fundamental than that of social cooperation, and persons should be defined in terms of minimal moral powers.

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