Disability rights and wrongs revisited

Tom Shakespeare has made his living, if one actually makes a living in academia and its peripheries, as a contrarian.His best-known effort in that role has been to question if not oppose the strong social model offered by the UK Marxist school of disability studies.As such, there had been a battle of the titans, as it were, between Michael Oliver, Colin Barnes and Tom Shakespeare that was well known in the UK and European circles, and was usually mentioned in a kind of breathless and somewhat bemused way that generally has been reserved for pop stars or for politicians.The fascinating thing about reading Shakespeare's revision of his 2006 book Disability Rights and Wrongs is how eminently reasonable it reads now after the sturm und drang of the last 10 years in those disability wars.Shakespeare brings interesting credentials since the last incarnation of the book because he left academia and worked for the World Health Organization, although now he has returned to the ivory tower of the University of East Anglia.You could say that some of the best bits of the new book are informed by that sojourn in the ways of the world.What is clear is that you do not want to be in the crosshairs of Shakespeare's aim.He is too damn smart and accurate to put up with inconsistencies and sloppy thinking.He does not suffer ideology in his search for a kind of truth.If he were a shopper, he would be the guy who is going to check the quality of every item in your store very carefully and probably get you to agree to come down on the price when you realize that what you were offering is not exactly what you had said it was.One of his biggest beefs is that, as he says, 'disability studies has failed to balance the demands of radical social change and intellectual rigour' (1).One can read this as an attack on the 'strong' social model, and indeed it is, but the other viable alternative, especially in the USA, is the cultural and critical model, now also emerging in the UK, is not spared attack either.For Shakespeare these are 'over-theoretical' and lack practical application.Thus, strangely for a contrarian, Shakespeare actually offers a middle way that is both intellectually rigorous and also has practical applications.This is what Shakespeare calls a 'critical realist' approach.What does that approach look like?It tries to take into account theoretical work as well as materialist politics.But it also wants us to think in a more nuanced way when we talk about disability.He wants us to see that the term 'disability' itself covers a multitude of conditions and states of being within those conditions.'Too often, disability studies is not grounded in an adequate understanding of what I call "actually existing disability", which means comprehending both the diversity of illness and impairment experiences and contexts, and the breadth of everyday life' (4).For Shakespeare, impairment is not the upbeat thing disability activists and some scholars might insist upon.Chronic illnesses, multiple impairments, pain and the like cause people to be 'disabled by society