Social Justice Tort Theory

Alongside the dominant law and economics and corrective justice approaches to tort law, a new genre of tort theory based on principles and perspectives of social justice has come into its own and deserves recognition. Social justice tort theory starts from the premise that tort law reflects and reinforces systemic forms of injustice in the larger society and maintains that the compensatory ideal of tort law cannot be extricated from these larger systems. It is multi-dimensional and intersectional, recognizing that the impact of injury lands intersectionally, sometimes changing the intensity of the injury or distorting the nature of the injury. Social justice tort scholars have examined torts in gendered and racialized contexts, as well as in ordinary cases that seem to have little to do with systemic injury. In addition to feminist and critical race theory, they have borrowed from critical disability studies, queer theory and political economy. Their work demonstrates how tort law unfairly distributes damages, fails to provide adequate relief for victims of sexual assault or for people who suffer racial insult and discrimination, and erases maternal and reproductive harms. In their work, we can see common deconstructive moves (an emphasis on disparate impacts and devaluation; a teasing out of cognitive bias; and a critique of exceptionalism in tort doctrine) as well as guiding principles for reconstruction (incorporating victims’ perspectives; treating boundaries between civil rights law and tort law as permeable; and enhancing dignity and recognition).

Integrating disability and developmental theories for an equitable inclusive education: towards transformative educational praxes

The US higher education institutions are legally bound to provide equal educational opportunities for diverse learners. This paper contends that despite the growing interest in implementing more inclusive pedagogy, those efforts still fall short of systematically addressing intersecting, oppressive, and anti-ableist practices in the classroom. I call for a theory that frames disability in the context of learning and development and overcomes dichotomized, reductionist and individualistic notions of disability and learning. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, Vygotsky’s theory of defectology and the Transformative Activist Stance, this paper outlines a transformative pedagogy framework for inclusive, equitable, and anti-ableist education for all learners.

Paved Trails and Shampoo Shopping

Poetry is a gentle but relentless coach, a lover, personal benchmark, and record for growth. She shifts beliefs, practices, and emotions, tracking pitfalls, steps back, steps around, stillness, like a smooth laketop or slow-streaming river. In this Research-Creation piece, I develop my version of ‘Crip Poetics’ through autoethnographic methods including video poems and hybrid prose-poetry writing. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Mobility Studies, I bring questions of white supremacy and settler colonialism into conversation with accessibility in Canada. I interview Indigenous people with varying relationships to disability and disabled people of multiple settler cultures, using qualitative methods including Hangout as Method (Warren Cariou) and Wheeling Interviews (Laurence Parent). Engaging with interview transcripts as text, to continue conversation and exchange with interviewees, this study offers reflections on interviewing as a method. Reflecting on the limits of participant-action research and representation, I interrogate the role of researchers in marginalized knowledge production, engaging with the limits and possibilities of ‘unsettling research’. I aim to redirect eugenic trends in disability discourse and history towards prioritizing the telling of our own stories. It's my hope that these conversations and the intersections of these struggles are brought to the fore—this selection being one avenue among many to further this work. Dance with me between words and beyond political affiliation.

Undergraduate creative arts students’ perceptions and attitudes toward disability: Advancing a critical disability studies informed curriculum

This study reports on the unanticipated findings of a small-scale, evaluative research project. Further to a pilot iteration, a cohort of undergraduate art students engaged with an immersive, inclusive arts curriculum informed by critical disability studies. Students’ perceptions and attitudes about disability were recorded at the outset and conclusion of the pedagogical project, through a qualitative questionnaire. Thematic analysis was employed to surface patterns in the cohort’s responses at both points in their learning journey. While the findings evidenced the anticipated shift from individualized perspectives about disability to an increasingly social, interactional perspective, the full extent of the medicalized gaze and internalized ableism at the outset of the study was unanticipated. This realization has been influential in developing the pedagogical approach and the framing of the content taught, and has exemplified both the potential and the need to learn about disability, disablement and diversity through art education.

Let them go! Compassionate release for disabled prisoners with chronic health conditions during the COVID-19 public health emergency

Inmates with disabilities are at high risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19 due to crowded and unsanitary conditions. The punishment for serious crimes is incarceration—not exposure to a dangerous, contagious virus. Prisoners have human rights, notwithstanding the loss of most of their civic rights. Critical Disability Studies draws attention to multiple and overlapping injustices and oppressions. Prisoners with disabilities often suffer from race and ethnic discrimination, poverty, trauma, multiple physical impairments, mental illness, and/or cognitive limitations. This essay calls for action to accelerate compassionate release of disabled inmates, many of whom are at high risk for COVID-19, and offers recommendations for improving conditions of confinement for disabled inmates who remain incarcerated.

Toward a Critical and Comparative Anthropology of Disability

This article places anthropology in dialogue with critical disability studies (CDS) in order to reassess historical and emerging ethnographic readings of difference. We argue that one unintended consequence of a lack of attention to disability in anthropology, generally, has been an impoverished conception of personhood and power. Building on insights from CDS and the ethnographic literature, we show how non-normative bodies and minds can play a critical role in relationships with non-human others and exemplary persons. Looking beyond hegemonic and secular ideas of disability as a form of misfortune or lack not only offers alternatives for being with disability, in keeping with the aims of CDS, but also shows new directions for comparative discussions of power and difference.

A call to rethink the Global North university: Mobilising disabled students’ experiences through the encounter of Critical Disability Studies and Epistemologies of the South

In the 1970s, disabled people and other marginalised social groups battled an exclusionary Global North university. Disability Studies emerged from those struggles as epistemologies shaped around a Westernised understanding of disability and inequalities, based on dialectic visions of progress and subjective liberation. Today, the advance of neoliberalism in universities, and its connection with colonial legacies, are embedded in different historical contingencies, and disabled students face new forms of discrimination. By merging analytical approaches from post-structural Critical Disability Studies and Epistemologies of the South, this article draws upon interviews with disabled students conducted in an Italian university to explore how neoliberal and capitalistic practices exclude certain knowledges and modalities of being university students. Through disabled students’ experiences, the article advances epistemologies that encompass processes of decolonisation and de-ableism of the university and argues for the Global North university to be an institution that can democratically reconcile polyhedral subjective possibilities of being.

Social Integrative Enterprises and the Construction of an Impaired Lumpenproletariat – a Swedish Case Study

This paper accounts for a study of the joint ambitions of the Swedish Public employment office and social enterprises to integrate jobseekers with impairments in the labor market. The number of jobseekers with impairments has increased in western labor markets. The Swedish labor market is a particular case in point. Why? I use critical disability studies in combination with Marxist studies on immaterial labor to develop the following answer: An increasing number of jobseekers are diagnosed as impaired, not because their bodily constitution makes them unfit to handle manual labor, but because their socio-cultural characteristics make them unfit to handle immaterial forms of labor. Furthermore, I show how the diagnosis of these jobseekers as impaired does not lead to that they are also considered disabled. On the contrary, they are considered to have a particular, bio-medically defined fit and ability when it comes to handling simple, manual and low paid forms of work. Hereby, I argue that they are made up as a bio-medically defined “lumpenproletariat”.

Exploring experiences of ableism in academia: a constructivist inquiry

To understand the experiences of the disabled in academia, a fully accessible and inclusive workshop conference was held in March 2018. Grounded in critical disability studies within a constructivist inquiry analytical approach, this article provides a contextualisation of ableism in academia garnered through creative data generation. The nuanced experiences of disabled academics in higher education as well as their collective understandings of these experiences as constructed through normalisation and able-bodiedness are presented. We show that disabled academics are marginalised and othered in academic institutions; that the neoliberalisation of higher education has created productivity expectations, which contribute to the silencing of the disabled academics’ perspectives and experiences due to constructions of normality and stigmatisation; and that it is important to enact policies, procedures, and practices that value disabled academics and bring about cultural and institutional changes in favour of equality and inclusion.