Sometimes I just wish it was all over

2023/11/01 by Colin Cameron · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Foucault, Power, and Ethics

paper · doi:10.1080/09687599.2023.2275525

openalex publication_date 2023/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

In this article I reflect upon having recently been invited to join a new departmental group being set up to talk about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; at the same time having been told to remember that my perspective is just one among equally valid others. I reflect upon what Drake (1999) has described as the 'fundamentally opposed' natures of the medical and social models, and upon the absurdity involved in a requirement to give assent to both. I consider the unfortunate dualism involved in claims that people 'have disabilities', and suggest that Sartre's dictum 'existence precedes essence' offers a way of thinking about disability that the medical model can't begin to make sense of. I draw upon statements by disabled people about how they feel about themselves to challenge conventional personal tragedy assumptions.

Cited by

• Neurodivergent perspectives in geoscience: Reflections from the development of paleontology museum educational materials
• Community views of neurodiversity, models of disability and autism intervention: Mixed methods reveal shared goals and key tensions

Discussions

• "Disability isn’t something people have. It is something that is done in the details of life – in the words, the acts, in the repeated, apparently inconsequential, behaviours that make up the unremark [bsky, 4 points, 1 comments]

Related

• The social model of disability: thirty years on
• The Paradox of Disability Culture: The need to combine versus the imperative to let go
• Disability: getting it “right”
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies
• An Illusory Interiority: Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion