ABSTRACT
The effects that disability advocacy knowledge has on political values make for this chapter’s dimension. Disability rights advocates need to remain aware of ongoing legal conventions on a global scale if they want to promote practical and political aims. Advocacy knowledge is equipped with authority that may discursively reframe legal texts’ functions as ultimate aims. Legal language’s power to make real what it demands comes to bear when it can contribute to agency by identifying a growing group of persons with disabilities. Disability rights advocates show how to use legal rhetoric (e.g., ‘self-determination’) to distinguish interest groups if needed for particular aims or affiliate them across cultures and disabilities when necessary. It is shown that if legal language ‘functions’, it allows advocates to meet politicians with formal legitimacy and at the same time be employed with stakeholders on the ground. Advocates’ task in the process is to connect the everyday knowledge of their constituents to a technical meta-code that is internationally recognised legal language. A discussion of annual United Nations slogans for disability rights suggests that this also involves the creation and repetition of slogans that resonate with disabled constituents and other goals in the global development agenda.
