Ableist Geographies, Disablist Spaces: Towards a Reconstruction of Golledge's 'Geography and the Disabled'

Geographers have only recently started to research and write about the experiences of people with disabilities, yet there is some evidence that they are replicating some of the more problematical aspects of what we might term an 'ableist sociology'. Its main features are the utilization of conceptions of disability which are reducible to the functional limitations of people with disabilities, the assertion of the normality (and naturalness) of able-bodiedness, the notion that disability is abnormal, even a product of deviant behaviour, and the assumption that the goal of society is to return disabled people back to a normal state (whatever that is). Any notion of celebrating, even recognizing, the vitality of difference seems beyond the emergent ableist geographies. This paper provides a critique of such geographies by considering the shortcomings of one of the more recent contributions in the genre, that by Golledge (1993).