ABSTRACT

Critical disability studies as it has developed across the humanities, social sciences, the arts, and educational studies in the United States is both a correction to and expansion of the way health sciences framed disability in medical research and knowledge building and in clinical practice. Critical disability studies sought to expand and in part refute this dominant understanding of disability, which critical disability studies claimed is the inherently human transformations of mind, body and senses over time in relation to world. The transformation in approaches to understanding disability and people with disabilities that yielded critical disability studies began generally in the 1980s. Critical disability studies are, of course, the academic study of disability. Most critical disability studies finds disability in the material world or in figural and textual representations. Straus's story of locating critical perspective in the lived experience of disability illustrates an often unnoticed but distinctive aspect of critical disability studies.