Welcome! In our first blog post, we share why we’ve created this online space to Mobilize CDS.
Health and human service professionals often work within an environment that frames disability within a medical model understanding. This means the “problem” of disability is understood as a deficit within an individual, and the solution is typically to help the individual fix the problem within them. For example, rehabilitation’s historical mandate is to return people to “normal” functioning, or at least as close to normal as possible. In physiotherapy, an example would be exercises to strengthen a child’s legs and body with a goal toward unassisted walking. In speech-language pathology, it could be group therapy for autistic children to work on social communication skills. Likewise, a social work client may be expected to adhere to specific rules to show how they qualify for supported housing.
This focus on the individual as the problem can hide the way that societal structures oppress and marginalize disabled people. With Mobilizing Critical Disability Studies for Change, we hope to support health and human service professionals, academics from traditional disciplines, and community members, engage in critical perspectives of disability and normalcy to work toward changing structural barriers and inequitable policies and practices.
The idea behind Mobilizing Critical Disability Studies for Change began with a collaboration between Karen Yoshida, Ann Fudge Schormans, Madeline Burghardt and Tracey Edelist, sharing how we all, as rehabilitation and social work professionals, came to embrace critical disability studies in our work. As we describe in our About Us page, our small group grew to include other scholars and community members who share our goal of bringing CDS to non-CDS spaces.
We’ve experienced how difficult it can be to create change within systems and institutions that are resistant to change. We turned to critical theories to question assumptions that ground each of our practices and which make disability a problem. These critical theories, along with the centering of disability community members and activists, helped us understand and examine the issues we faced within our disciplines, while working toward change. Our collaborative dialogues provided us with support as we worked to bring CDS into our practices, teaching, and research.
If you are interested in learning more about our experiences coming to critical disability studies, and the motivation for the creation of this website, please consider reading our paper, Critical Reflections on Disability in Health and Social Work Professions: Coming to Critical Disability Studies. The abstract, as well as a link to the full article, are below.
Join Us and Share in the Dialogue
We hope that you consider joining Mobilizing CDS for Change to engage with other CDS scholars, activists, and community members so that we can grow a supportive community.
We’d love to know about your experiences bringing CDS to non-CDS spaces, and how this website might assist you. After joining, please consider posting about your own experiences on the discussion forum.
Tracey, Madeline, Ann, and Karen
Critical Reflections on Disability in Health and Social Work Professions: Coming to Critical Disability Studies.
Burghardt, M., Edelist, T., Fudge Schormans, A., Yoshida, K. (2021). Critical reflections on disability in health and social work professions: Coming to critical disability studies. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 10(1), 23-53. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v10i1.743
Abstract: This paper describes how four ‘helping’ professionals came to embrace and teach critical disability studies (CDS) perspectives rather than biomedical approaches to impairment and disability that traditionally inform those professions (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, social work, and speech-language pathology). Sharing examples from our experiences, we describe how we came to question the normative, ableist assumptions of our professional disciplines. We then briefly outline literature demonstrating how critical approaches have been incorporated into professional research and practice and discuss possible obstacles and tensions in adopting more widespread critical approaches into professional spaces. We conclude by suggesting that continued development of connections among scholars and activists within CDS, rehabilitation and social work, and the community, is necessary to ensure that intersectional critical perspectives in relation to disability become a core component of professional training programs.