Luke Beesley

My PhD research, undertaken in collaboration with the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People. focuses on the history of the Disabled People's Movement (DPM) in Britain and, in particular, its contribution to political theory. Utilising the recently opened Disabled People's Archives in Manchester - the largest collection of DPM papers in Britain - I seek to show the depth and nuance of the DPM's analytic models and theoretical positions; foregrounding the concrete emancipatory struggles and competing visions of equality and liberation which made this intellectual work possible. Against modern readings of the DPM's analysis, I argue that this intellectual corpus is neither monolithic, myopic, nor reductive; and is best understood as a complex integration of macrological social theory, institutional critique, and theories of social change into an operational model of social movement practice. This entails that the DPM's history and theoretical productions are read in dialogue with political economy, theories of the state, and contemporary social movement history.