This guide will help you find the best online and print resources for research in Disability Studies. Use the navigation menu above to find background sources, books, articles, journals, search tools, statistics, primary sources, and more.
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What Is Disability Studies?
Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study and scholarship that explores the complex phenomenon of disability by incorporating social, cultural, psychological, educational, historical, legal, political, literary, religious, and philosophical perspectives, including the connections between disability and other identities including gender, sexuality, class, and race. Disability Studies approaches disability as a social, cultural, and political construct rather than only a medical condition.
Why Is Disability Studies Research Challenging?
The interdisciplinary nature of disability studies
- Disability Studies crosses many different disciplines.
- You will need to learn to distinguish between medical, scientific, historical, sociological, and other treatments of disability, and find sources that fit within your research framework.
Creative thinking about terminology is needed when searching databases
- Often when talking about disability in the past, outdated, inaccurate, and offensive terms were used, instead of modern ones. Historical research may use these outdated terms.
- Many learning, social, or hidden disabilities were not recognized at all or were identified incorrectly, with different terminology given to them than would be given today.
- Research, especially books, may be cataloged using outdated and/or biased terminology.
- In searching for sources, older terms will have to be used as well as modern ones. Especially when searching historical materials or primary sources, it may be necessary to use terms that are contemporary within the time period that you are searching. Examples include asylum, retarded, crippled, or handicapped. Even though this language is offensive by modern standards, it may have been used in the writings of the time.
Historical Lack of Cataloging
- Until relatively recently, disability studies material may not have been identified with relevant subject headings and tags.
- Historically, some subject headings and tags did not exist.
Keywords for Search
Some keywords to try:
- abledness, ableism, ableist, able-bodied, able-bodiedness
- access, accessible, accessibility
- ageism, ageist, aging
- Deaf, deafness, deaf studies (some Deaf people consider themselves to be a linguistic/cultural minority, not disabled)
- dis/ability, disability, disabilities, "disability studies", "disability rights", disabled
- disease, dis-ease
- enable, enabling
- inclusion, inclusiveness, inclusivity
- normalcy, normals, normative
- sick, sickness
- universal design
If you're looking for specific readings or theorizations of a topic, try combining your keyword with frequently paired terms such as:
- advocate, advocacy
- biology, biological, bioethics
- body, bodies
- critical
- difference
- "disability studies"
- discrimination
- "identity politics"
- medical, medicalization
- narrative, narratives
- politics, political
- representation, representations
- rhetoric, rhetorical, "visual rhetoric"
- signify, signifying
- visible, visibility, invisible, invisibility, visual
