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’.
The legacy of Russell’s work was to embed considerations of disability in an analysis centred on capitalist social relations, and to highlight the fundamentally economic and social nature of ideas around ‘impairment’. In a period where disability rights in the academy are dominated by questions of identity and inclusion, stripped of considerations of how society demarcates who can and cannot labour in the pursuit of profit under ‘normal’ conditions, her work is an intellectual high water mark. It remains an essential lens for how we might think about disability in the contemporary period.
After Russell, others working in a materialist tradition developed the ‘social model of disability’. In ‘contrast to the medical or individual model, [the social model] explains disability in relation to social barriers and the organization of society’ — a society that disables the person or, in our research, the worker. Society ‘permits’ some disabled bodies such as ‘supercrips’ — those that ‘overcome’ their disability and make productive contributions — which effectively designates other disabled people as not useful. Society’s (limited) support of disabled people is used to show how progressive and accommodating society is, ignoring that such support is highly inadequate and involves predominantly ‘aesthetic efforts’. Disabled bodies are positioned as useful or not in relation to productivity, thus demonstrating the bounds of acceptable citizenship.
In the contemporary university, academics need to be able to work long hours, continuously conduct and publish research to exacting deadlines, win grants, teach intensively to rigid timeframes, travel and network internationally, and demonstrate professionalism at all times. In Australia, job scarcity and insecure employment, including systemic unpaid work and overwork, also permeate the sector. It is in this context that a multi-institution Australia-based research team of academics with disabilities and their allies commenced a project on ‘Scholarship Disabled’. The findings presented in our two articles to date, and overviewed below, form part of the first stage of this project which took place at a large, multi-site university in an Australian capital city [...]
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