We wrapped up season four talking to Prof Dan Goodley (Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield) and Dr Kirsty Liddiard (Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education, University of Sheffield). We focused on the contributions of critical disability studies to the medical humanities, including the ‘absent presence’ of disability in medical humanities. Dan and Kirsty advocated for a paradigm shift that centres disability as the driving subject of inquiry and discussed their programmes of research, ‘Disability Matters’ and ‘A new cultural politics of breathing’.

Here are some messages we took away from this thoughtful conversation – and some key reasons to tune into the podcast!

Critical Disability Studies and (a challenge to) Medical Humanities

We started our conversation exploring the relationships between critical disability studies and medical humanities. Dan and Kirsty challenged the medical humanities field, noting that disability often appears as an ‘absent presence’: present, as an object or prop to framing questions about the world, but absent in the sense of disability representation in academics, scholars, and disabled people with expertise. Medical humanities can examine narratives of illness and disability, but is less likely to examine disability in the positive, nor represent the lives of disabled people as joyful, exciting, providing expertise, being scholars, academics, or successful in their lives. Medical humanities, wider academia, and society in general approaches disability first and foremost as a problem. We discussed ableism and disablism, and ways in which society, academia and research can favour non-disabled people and discriminate against those who are disabled.

Transdisciplinary and activism

In turn, we learnt that disability studies takes a different, transdisciplinary approach, and a positive, political, activist approach.  Scholarship and political, societal change are intrinsically linked, in which disability is framed positively, and strongly rejects the disability-as-a-problem language of many other approaches. We discussed the deep challenge, and opportunities, that disability studies can give to other areas of study such as medical humanities. Dan and Kirsty discussed what disability studies research looked like, and showed us new meanings to coproduction, placing disability positively and centrally. We examined together the methodologies of disability studies, and the powerful place of positive approaches that trumped specific methodologies.

Please take a listen, to enjoy the positive and robust debate, and perhaps understand the world differently and anew.