Resolving the concept wars in disability and health

Over the past four decades, definitions of and responses to disability have undergone significant change. Challenging embodied medical deficiency as an essential characteristic of disability, the field of disability studies has become a viable and growing locus of inquiry, praxis and activism, and too frequently an opponent of health professional fields. In this session, we suggest that the discipline of disability studies and the study of disability, in which health professions engage, have much to say to one another, not as enemies, but as complimentary dialogues and research agenda/s that together, can bring pluralistic and complex understanding to bear on disability, health, access to healthy environments, and human rights. In this session we therefore interrogate and clarify the roots of and current fractures between the study of disability and disability studies and propose a resolution to this major conceptual conflict. We begin our discussion with a brief overview of the differences in the origins of disability studies and the study of disability, analyzing why disability studies matured outside of health professional scholarship. We then examine the current landscape, illuminating the potential of the diverse and often warring fields of disability studies and the study of disability to inform one another. Looking to the future we suggest rethinking disability through an integrative, interactive framework of juncture/disjuncture and illustrate how this approach can harness the theoretical power of pluralism to advance health and wellbeing for persons with disabilities.