From Impairment to Disability and Beyond: Critical Explorations in Disability Studies

Disability Studies, concerned with deciphering the complexities of social construction of disability, examines the legitimacy of the individualistic biomedical considerations of impairment. The social model, challenging the dominant medical paradigm that fixed impairment and reasons for exclusion in the individual, posits society at the centre of disability discourse. Moving beyond the notions of individual and impairment, the Critical Disability Studies argues for contesting the 'context' in constructing disability. This paper, besides attempting to explicate the different models of disability and trying to bring out the constraints that disability scholarship in India has to negotiate with, argues for an indigenous framework to understand disability.