ABSTRACT
In 1991 the Rowntree Foundation supported a series of seminars on ‘Researching physical disability’. A number of the papers presented were published together, in 1992, in a special issue of the journal Disability, Handicap & Society (now Disability & Society). This chapter and chapter 22, by Lesley Jones and Gloria Pullen, were originally prepared for the seminar series. Here, Jenny Morris discusses why disabled people feel alienated by disability research and argues that there is much to learn from feminist theory and methodology, despite its neglect of the experience of disabled women. The challenge for feminist researchers is to integrate this experience into their analysis of social oppression. Adopting a principle of making the personal political will take women and disabled people out of what Jenny Morris describes as a ‘research ghetto’ into the mainstream, where the study of their lives should be seen as of general relevance to all groups within our present inequitable society.
