Advocacy for Students with Disabilities

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Disability Culture

Is there really a Disability Culture? What is there to "value" in disability? Is it true that many people with disabilities don’t want to change and wouldn’t want to be "cured"? Psychologist Carol Gill suggests that people with disabilities share a remarkably unified worldview underpinned by the following core values, strengths and skills:

1) An acceptance of human differences...

2) A matter-of-fact orientation towards helping; an acceptance of human vulnerability and interdependence as part of life.

3) A tolerance for lack of resolution, for dealing with the unpredictable and living with the unknowns or less than desired outcomes.

4) Disability humour - the ability to laugh at "the oppressor" and or own situations.

5) Skill in managing multiple problems, systems, technology and assistants.

6) A sophisticated futures orientation; an ability to construct complex plans taking into account multiple contingencies and realistically anticipated obstacles.

7) A carefully honed capacity... to sort out, fill in the gaps and grasp the latent meaning in contradictory social messages.

8) A flexible, adaptive approach to tasks; a creativity stimulated by both limited resources and experience with untraditional modes of operating.

"A Psychological View of Disability Culture" (Disability Studies Quarterly, Fall, 1995)

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