ABSTRACT
The model, as academics and activists with a disability studies background know well, emphasises that disability is a social construction. This chapter aims to support the thinking of disability, ability and impairment. It focuses on the theories and methodologies of cultural studies is of special relevance for understanding contemporary debates and disability politics. The core idea of the model requires that disability is tackled as a social problem through accessibility and participation, by disability mainstreaming and embracing human rights policies. A cultural model of dis/ability regards neither disability nor impairment as supposedly clear-cut categories of pathological classification that automatically, in the form of a causal link, result in social discrimination. The cultural model of dis/ability claims that both disability and ability relate to prevailing symbolic orders and institutional practices of producing normality and deviance, the self and the other, familiarity and alterity.
