Disability as a Social Construct: Legislative Roots

Forgive me for going on a tangent here, but in grad school, which is ostensibly about producing a dissertation as part of becoming a scholar, we rarely are assigned to read other dissertations. I think this might be the first dissertation I’ve read.

Liachowitz advances the position that disabilities are not physiological or medical per se, but rather the results of public policies that make people disabled by consigning them to institutions, discouraging education and employment, and involvement in the community. This is a worthwhile thesis, and one I agree with, but the specific evidence here is not well mustered. If poor policies are a result of pre-existing prejudice against the disabibled, then prejudice is the object of investigation. If it is outdated legal precedents, then those need to be fully traced from their origins to the present, not simply alluded to. The most interesting scholarship is the most distant, Colonial and Revolutionary era laws concerning care of the handicapped. As the work moves into the Industrial and Progressive eras, the work becomes scattered and unfocused.

This stuff (PhDing) is starting to look disturbingly hard.