ABSTRACT
Following two lines of inquiry—how dis/ability is understood and where relationships between advocates indicate power-knowledge—the epistemic community of disability advocates’ symbolic power has been shown to rest on who gains access and is recognised as having a voice in this rights debate. The location of a relevant philosophy of dis/ability is equally critical in the process. The important characteristics of this community are narrative fixity (e.g., via invoking human rights and legal reference to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [CRPD]), epistemic permeability (e.g., via reference to sources of knowledge that concern more than dis/ability issues), and institutionalised critique (e.g., of biomedical knowledge). Paradigmatically, rights advocacy’s social-creationist positions rely on opposing dominant biopsychosocial knowledge. Yet the historically developed weight put on physical impairments and medical diagnoses persists to this day and has marginalised some subgroups in the global debate. For instance, the Independent Living movement claims authorship of many legal concepts that have entered the CRPD, but much of its discussion has long evaded psychosocial and intellectual disabilities. When disability rights advocates claim to speak for ‘the world’s largest minority’, they invariably pick up where population statistics meet human rights’ responses to structural inequalities. This makes rights advocacy itself the target of internal and external critique.
