universities

Just announced: I'm being given the International Sociological Association's Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. This award is given once every 4 years; it's a great honour. My thanks to the ISA! And to the many, many colleagues & friends I have worked with, over the years.

The social science I value is engaged in the world, it doesn't watch from a distance. It's empirical and utopian. It's willing to explore questions ranging from personal life to global empire. It doesn't flinch from issues of violence and power. But it also asks how new and better possibilities emerge.

Marta Russell (1951-2013), the US based writer, activist and leading critical thinker, argued that disability was not a medical condition or impairment, but a ‘socially created category derived from labor relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society’. Disabled bodies are useful only to the extent that they create value. Capitalist social norms both demarcate who is and is not disabled in contemporary society, and at the same time oppress the disabled body. It is productivity and profits that dictate restrictions on the disabled, as well as what limited adjustments may be facilitated for the disabled to better ‘fit’ social structures. Disabled bodies are viewed as a problem. In relation to work, Connor and Coughlin argue that they are often an ‘inevitable part of the “surplus” population, not quite fully human, unable to participate in society, at best a burden and at worst a drain’.