What Is the Social Model of Disability?

Wed Nov 4 · Ideas

Imagine a building with a staircase out front and no ramp. Someone who uses a wheelchair can't get in.

Here's the question: what's stopping them? The obvious answer is the wheelchair. The social model of disability says to look again. The wheelchair gets them everywhere else. The thing stopping them is the stairs.

That flip, from the body to the building, is one of the most useful ideas of the last fifty years.

Where it came from

The idea took shape in Britain in the 1970s. After a meeting in November 1975, a group called the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation put out a short document in 1976, Fundamental Principles of Disability. [1] It drew a line between two things that usually get blended together:

• Impairment: "lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body."
• Disability: the ways the world is set up that shut you out because of it. [1]

In 1983 the sociologist Mike Oliver gave this way of thinking a name: the social model of disability. [2] He set it against what he called the individual model, which treats disability as a problem located entirely inside a person. [2]

The idea in one sentence

Your body or brain has a shape. Whether that shape becomes a problem depends a lot on the shape of the world around it.

Some everyday examples

Glasses are the classic one. Plenty of people can't see clearly without them. Nobody thinks of short-sightedness as a disability in most places, because glasses are cheap, normal and everywhere. The impairment is still there. The world just fits around it.

Now try some that hit closer to home:

• A brain that can't filter background noise is fine in a quiet room. It's the open-plan office that turns it into a problem.
• Someone who processes spoken instructions slowly does great with the same instructions written down.
• Someone who thinks in bursts at 3 a.m. struggles with a world that only works 9 to 5.

In each case, the person didn't change. The setting did.

What it doesn't say

The social model doesn't say impairments aren't real, or that they never hurt, or that everything is fixable with a ramp. Pain is real. Fatigue is real. Some parts of how a body or brain works are hard no matter how good the building is.

Over the years, people have argued about where the model's edges are, including some of the people who helped create it. [3] It's a lens, not a law of physics. But it's a lens that keeps catching things the old one missed.

Why it rhymes with how a lot of us think

There's a reason this idea lands so well with pattern-minded people. It's a systems answer. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this part?" it asks "how does this part fit the machine, and is the machine badly designed?"

Temple Grandin did something similar with cattle. Instead of asking why the cows were "difficult," she asked what in the chute was spooking them, and found the hole letting in the sun. [4]

Engineers call it design. Ecologists call it niche. A lot of us just call it Tuesday: noticing that the room is the problem, not you.

The cosmic part

Every organism on Earth is shaped for some environment. A fish is brilliant in water and stranded on a dock. Nobody calls the fish broken.

Our eyes catch only a thin slice of the light that's out there, and our senses are tuned to a narrow band of the universe. [5] Human-built worlds narrow it further, built around one imagined "default" body and mind.

The social model is a reminder that the stairs were a choice. Somebody drew them. Somebody else can draw a ramp.

Sources

1. Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (1976). Fundamental Principles of Disability. Disabled People's Archive. disabledpeoplesarchive.com
2. Oliver, M. (1983). Social Work with Disabled People. Macmillan. link.springer.com
3. Oliver, M. (2013). "The social model of disability: thirty years on." Disability & Society 28(7). doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.818773
4. Colorado State University, SOURCE. "Temple Grandin: CSU's one-of-a-kind mind." source.colostate.edu
5. NASA Science. "Visible Light." science.nasa.gov