ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the diversity of experiences of disability and demonstrates how geographies of disability have enriched the theorisation of place. We explore key epistemological and ontological debates surrounding the relationship between disability and place. Epistemologically, we consider tensions between structural and relational approaches to understanding place and its (dis)empowering effects on people with disability. Ontologically, we consider the systems of categorisation that underpin discourses on disability and place. Specifically, we focus on the binary of ‘mainstream’ versus ‘specialist’ places, and its role in debates about the oppression of people with disability, deinstitutionalisation and social inclusion. Geographies of disability offer vivid illustrations of how certain people are empowered, and others oppressed, through the design, regulation and social relations of place; and how within the limits of constraints, potentialities emerge in everyday encounters between people as well as other non-human beings and things, which together constitute a person’s ability in ‘place’.
