ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the activist roots of disability studies and explores its development as a discipline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The relationship between different models of disability, particularly the distinction between the social and the medical models, extends debates outlined in Chapter One about the complex and shifting politics of defining “disability”. Resistance to the medical model of disability and the theorisation of an alternative social model underpinned political and social campaigns of the late 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s, and informed legislative changes in the 1990s in the UK, the US, and elsewhere. From the 1980s onwards, disability studies began to gain increasing recognition as an academic field in its own right.
