Ableism, Disablism, and other Ability Judgment terms: Mapping out the Academic Literature to support ability judgment justice research, teaching and advocacy

“Ableism” and “disablism” have been coined by the disabled people’s rights movement to call out ability judgment problems disabled people face. Three ability-based study streams exist: studies in ableism (Campbell), critical studies of ableism (Goodley), and ability studies, short for ability expectation and ableism studies (Wolbring). Over 50 ability judgment-related concepts have been coined, such as internalized ableism and disablism, techno-ableism, ability obsolescence, disability justice, ability judgment justice or shorter ability justice (different from disability justice and dis/ability justice), and ability injustice. Ableism and disablism are employed in relation to disabled people and the intersectionality of disabled people and non-disabled marginalized identities and realities, but also to analyze the relationships between humans in general, humans and animals, humans and nature, humans and post/trans/cyborg humans, and humans and machines. Ability judgments are seen to have the potential to be used with negative (disable, disablism, disablement) and positive consequences (enable/enablism/enablement) for disabled people and other marginalized groups and entities, such as animals and nature. Given the importance and diversity of the social dynamic of ability judgments, we looked for, but could not find, a review that analyzed the ability judgment discussions in the academic literature. The objective of our study was to analyze academic abstracts present in SCOPUS, EBSCO HOST (80 databases), and Web of Science that contained the terms “ableism” or “disablism” or “ableist” or “disableist” using thematic analysis, manifest hit count coding, and bibliometric approaches and the lenses of disability studies, social dominance theory, system justification theory, synthetic participants, and concept borrowing. Our analysis suggests that although the visibility of the terms has increased in the last five years, there are many gaps as to who used the terms and in which context. Our findings can be used by many different disciplines, fields, and societal discussions to strengthen the theoretical and practical engagement with ability judgments in relation to disabled people and beyond.