ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the project of normalisation and describes three small projects with disabled people. It considers several readings of a project of beyond normalisation, interrogating the projects via the several readings so as to examine their contribution to the broader project. The project of transforming the lives of disabled people raises issues which include the theoretical-political matter of how this transformation is to occur. D. Hevey describes the oppression of disabled people as deriving from the economic relations of production, the cultural oppression of disabled people associated with the position of ‘the flawed body’ in western culture and from the anxieties of the able-bodied about their own position in the labour market. Sociological analysis which notes the fragmentation, and possible articulation, of small projects within a wider theory of governance and movements around it, may also contribute to reducing the oppression of disabled people.
