ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, as the disability movement gathered momentum in the UK, a powerful conceptual tool emerged in the form of what became known as the social model of disability. The social model, widely debated but nevertheless still influential today, rejects an individualist, medicalized conception of disability and instead draws attention to the multiple barriers which exclude disabled people from fully participating in society. Building on these ideas in the early 1990s, disability studies academics began to examine the ways that disabled people had also been excluded from the research process. Challenging the way that disabled people had historically been used and exploited as ‘research subjects’, a new research paradigm emerged which came to be known as emancipatory disability research.
