From pathology to affirmation: disability philosophy in everyday life

This paper argues for an affirmative disability philosophy and research methodology. Even after four decades of critical disability studies, much of what we encounter in public spaces - in relation to disability - on a day to day basis remain untouched by this critical scholarship. With reference to composite narratives from two research projects and our own personal entanglements we consider dominant ways in which everyday philosophies of disability threaten to pathologise people with learning disabilities as objects and counter these by offering an alternative affirmative philosophy. We explore disability as affirmation; humane, unbounded, potential. This way of knowing disability should be a regular feature of common parlance and philosophical discourse and requires being informed by disabled people and critical disability studies scholarship. We explore the ways in which inserting disability-as-affirmation into everyday conversations and public life can have significant wider societal impacts through offering a more expansive philosophy of disability.