ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary fields of cultural disability studies and disability studies in education. This book brings all three fields together under the rubric of Cultural Disability Studies in Education (CDSE). Tutors and students are encouraged to combine disability studies and aesthetics in order to explore cuocularnormative qualities communicated in cultural representations of the 1890s. The book discusses the reduction of disability to non-normative negativisms that focuses on what can be thought of as a by-product of the normative social aesthetic, for notions of freakery often derive from preoccupations with the manner in which society is visually represented. Underpinning this conception of CDSE is the tripartite model of disability. In the terms of the tripartite model, dominant normative positivisms can and often do lead to non-normative negativisms.
