ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a theoretical and methodological overview of disability-related power-knowledge. It outlines which professionals and advocates currently contribute knowledge about dis/ability to the general public, to politicians, and to disabled people themselves. Both knowledge that is acquired academically and that is gained from lived experience are assumed to claim powerful discursive positions. A key hypothesis in this work marks dis/ability knowledge contributors and disability rights advocates as a so-called epistemic community (thereby updating the concept): a group of experts who hold (a) an improvement of the world as one of their key interests and (b) a change of people’s perception and values as their principal instrument. Following a concept of meta-coding as a tool to indicate agreed material realities of disability, the community’s members enter negotiations for changing legal rights, producing powerful norms in the process. Language is recognised as playing a critical role in the production of legal normativity, and linguistic framing of this social movement’s authoritative codes are to be checked for continuous reinterpretation and appropriation. Clear evidence of changing structural knowledge due to dis/ability discourses appears in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which shifted dominant norms in rights drafting and expertise.
