Disability History outside of a Western Framework

by

Wei Yu Wayne Tan

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0026

Introduction

As an academic field, disability history is centered on studies of disability in historical contexts. Disability history grew out of disability studies, an interdisciplinary field that explores disability across various disciplines, genres, geographical regions, and time periods. In the early years of development, from the 1970s to the 1990s, disability studies scholarship focused on the United States and Western Europe (broadly speaking, Western societies). The scholarship emphasized the understanding of disability through the social model of disability, which explains disability as a concept and experience arising from society’s discrimination against people with disabilities. The social model, thus, approaches disability as an urgent matter requiring the redress of injustice and the fight for disability rights. It resists previous approaches to disability, particularly the medical model of disability, which focuses on the use of medical means to cure and/or eradicate disability. These interpretations of disability in disability studies, including cultural, political, and feminist perspectives from new disability studies scholarship, inform the development of disability history. Since 2000, disability history has expanded to introduce global perspectives on disability. Also, disability is a term that now includes a wide range of disabilities and chronic illnesses, such as physical impairments, cognitive disabilities, mental illnesses, and others. There is a growing amount of scholarship on disability in non-Western societies. These are societies outside of the traditional Western focus and framework in understudied regions: Asia, the Americas (the Caribbean and Latin/South America), Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Central/Eastern Europe, and Oceania are surveyed in this article. The idea that disability is universal yet also culturally contingent on society and time period is a common thread that links many works in disability history. Another common idea is that no analytical model of disability (the social model, the medical model, or other models) perfectly reflects the realities of disability because societies are unevenly affected by historical changes. Non-Western societies provide ample examples of how disability is and was conceived differently in ways that highlight the local and localized adaptations and inflections of global phenomena—such as empire building, imperialism, and postcolonialism. Furthermore, the examples show how non-Western societies conceptualize disability in ways that exceed Western concepts of justice and rights. In terms of breadth and approach, the diverse sampling of works looks within and beyond the boundaries of disability history. The list features approaches to disability within disability history, and interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to disability history through the history of science, technology and medicine, disability studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, literary studies, and other fields of study. It is intended for a broad, inclusive readership, and uses recent and current English-language scholarship to start new conversations about the directions and intersections of disability history, including perspectives on how disability history can be positioned in the contexts of or alongside different fields for a global understanding of disability.

Overview

Disability history focused on the United States and Europe (Western Europe), which has a longer history of scholarship compared to the more recent scholarship on non-Western global regions, offers a good starting point for surveying the methodological issues and topics of interest in disability history. Poore 2007 and Nielsen 2012 are two examples that show how disability has been central to national identity and nation building in Germany and the United States, respectively, as well as how disability can be a category for rethinking national history. Kafer 2013 and Goodley, et al. 2021 represent some of the recent theoretical interventions in disability studies, which could provide new materials for theoretical framings of disability history. Burch and Rembis 2014; Rembis, et al. 2018; and Cleall 2023 are several edited volumes on disability history. They present case studies of a range of societies (including non-US and non-European societies) and can be used for comparative studies of disability history. For article-length overviews of the directions and contents of disability history, refer to Blackie and Moncrieff 2022, and McGuire 2024. Also useful as resources for methods and case studies are Linker 2013 and Virdi, et al. 2024 (a special journal issue), which spotlight disability history and the intersections with the history of science, technology, and medicine.

• Blackie, Daniel, and Alexia Moncrieff. “State of the Field: Disability History.” History (The Journal of the Historical Association) 107.377 (2022): 789–811.

  DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.13315

  A survey of disability history from the rise of disability rights movements (1970s–1980s) to current international scholarship; discusses significant methodological perspectives on disability history and the scholarship on activism, war, and empire studies. Features extensive footnotes on published works.

• Burch, Susan, and Michael Rembis, eds. Disability Histories. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

  Provides modern (primarily 19th-century and 20th-century) case studies of disability history on family, culture, knowledge, representation, identity, and other topics, with a focus on the United States/North America and Western Europe, and featuring global perspectives on Brazil, Uganda, India, and the former Soviet Union.

• Cleall, Esme, ed. Global Histories of Disability, 1700–2015: Power, People and Place. New York: Routledge, 2023.

  Explores the intersection of disability, power, people, and place, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries, and explains why colonialism (including postcolonialism), mobility, and other frameworks contribute to global approaches to disability history. The non-US societies surveyed include Mauritius and other French colonies, the Caribbean, Kenya, and Poland.

• Goodley, Dan, Rebecca Lawthom, Kirsty Liddiard, and Katherine Runswick-Cole. “Key Concerns for Critical Disability Studies.” International Journal of Disability and Social Justice 1.1 (November 2021): 27–49.

  DOI: 10.13169/intljofdissocjus.1.1.0027

  A survey of disability studies through a review of the factors that intersect with disability, a roadmap of what is called “critical disability studies,” and an expansion of disability studies through critical theoretical reflection. Explores the possibilities of disability studies, such as alliances between disabled identities and other identities, connections to posthuman or nonhuman subjects, and others.

• Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

  Proposes a rereading of disability studies through a political/relational model of disability that draws on the social and medical models of disability; discusses perspectives, such as feminist/queer approaches to disability, to foreground coalitions, social justice, and new disabled-related futures for disability studies and people with disabilities.

• Linker, Beth. “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.4 (Winter 2013): 499–535.

  DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2013.0074

  Provides a survey of the development of the history of medicine in the United States through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and makes the case for understanding disability from within and also beyond the history of medicine; the journal issue features several responses to Linker’s article (articles by Daniel J. Wilson, Catherine Kudlick, and Julie Livingston) that share the authors’ thoughts on engaging with the methods of disability history and the history of medicine.

• McGuire, Coreen Anne. “What Is Disability History the History of?” History Compass 22.6 (2024): e12813.

  DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12813

  A reflection on developments in disability history, from how the focus on materials and material history (the design model) exceeds the social and medical models of disability to how new methods can recover the hidden histories of disability and people with disabilities; provides an intervention from the history of science and technology to contextualize disability history.

• Nielsen, Kim E. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

  A new view of US history from the precolonial period through the twentieth century using the lens of disability history. Explores significant moments in disability history, such as institutionalization in the 1800s and the civil rights and disability rights activism during and after the 1960s. A model for writing US disability history.

• Poore, Carol. Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

  DOI: 10.3998/mpub.223254

  A new view of 20th-century German society organized around disability in history, politics, culture, art, literature, and film from the Weimar Republic through the Nazi era, postwar reconstruction, and medical ethical debates in the twenty-first century; concludes with self-reflection (in chapter 9, “We Shall Overcome Overcoming: An American Professor’s Reflections on Disability in Germany and the United States”) by the author on the personal experience of disability.

• Rembis, Michael, Catherine J. Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

  A broad coverage of disability history with global perspectives, featuring the United States/North America, Western Europe, West Africa, the Arab region, and South Asia. Organized into the following five sections: “Concepts and Questions,” “Work,” “Institutions,” “Representations,” and “Movements and Identities”. Focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it has several chapters (e.g., chapter 3, “Intellectual Disability in the European Middle Ages”) on earlier periods.

• Virdi, Jaipreet, Mara Mills, and Sarah F. Rose, eds. Special Issue: Disability and the History of Science. Osiris 39 (2024).

  A journal issue that explores disability history and the history of science in their overlapping contexts; introduces new perspectives that inform a new “disability history of science”; and features articles on disability history and the connections with such topics as engineering, statistics, industrialization, scientific labor, epidemics, race, and empire.