Back and Forth to Square One: Emancipatory Disability Research at the Margins

A critique by which mainstream disability research is seen as essentially parasitic on, and exploitative of, disabled people’s social oppression, and as opposed to their social and political interests, emerged early in the consolidation of Britain’s Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) (Hunt: 1981). Of attempts to develop alternative, ‘emancipatory’, models of researching disability, the most influential variant of the critique and solutions to the problem of exploitation have been those developed by Mike Oliver (1992) and his frequent co-author Gerry Zarb (1992). In their two seminal essays, Oliver and Zarb offer a cultural materialist explanation of the disenfranchisement - or ‘aleiantion’ - of disabled people in the production of research about them and their lives, and argue for the radical recentring of disabled participants in decisions taken over research aims, methodologies, and dissemination.


In this presentation, I argue that Oliver and Zarb’s reliance on cultural materialism overly individualises the problems of parasitism and exploitation found in Hunt’s earlier critique, and engenders a one sided and un-nuanced description of alienation within research processes. I firstly show that Oliver and Zarb’s works rely on a strong analogy between the production of disability as a social category and that of commodities. This foundational claim leads the authors: i) to limit discussion of alienation to the four forms identified by Marx (1988 [1844]) between individual workers and products of labour; ii) equate contestations of the meaning of disability with a crisis of production; in which ideas about disability constitute productive forces and research methodologies ‘social relations of research production’. In their consequent frameworks, the key task of the researcher is to give clear representation and effect to the individual thoughts, views, and self-conceptions of a research participant. Any failure to do so is explained by researchers’ (conscious or unconscious) alignment with hegemonic social practices or structures.


Shortcomings in the operationalisation of these insights in their own work - admitted by Zarb at the time and later by Oliver (quoted in FInkelstein: 1999) - are not, I argue, the results of moral and political failings as they suggest. Rather, following Hunt’s lead, I indicate that alienation and parasitism are rooted not in the contestation of meanings, but in the separation of social processes and their descriptions necessary for administering disability as a social problem. Using this historical materialist account, I suggest that practices of accountability and reciprocity necessary to overcome alienated research remain insufficient when conducted solely as relations between individuals; and require for their realisation alignment with the concrete liberatory projects of disabled people rather than abstracted self-conceptions or views. This, I argue with Hunt, necessitates both a recognition of multiple and dis-analogous social processes in the constitution of the disablement, and a return to an analysis of the objective social world - albeit one which can no longer claim to be neutral.




Works Cited:


Hunt, P (1981) ‘Settling accounts with the parasite people - a critique of A Life Apart by Miller & Gwynne’ Disability Challenge (1) (pp. 37-50)


Finkelstein, V (1999) ‘Doing disability research’ Disability & Society (14:6) (pp. 859-867)


Mark, K (1988) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 London: Prometheus Books


Oliver, M (1992) ‘Changing the social relations of research production’ Disability & Society (7:2) (pp. 101-114)


Zarb, G (1992) ‘On the road to Damascus: first steps towards changing the relations of disability research production’ Disability & Society (7:2) (pp, 125-138)