The Social Model

From Individual Bodies to Disabling Environments

The social model framework arose from the experience and analysis of disabled people. An analysis that “relocated” the problem of disability from bodies and minds to the social, political, cultural, and physical contexts or environments in which people lived was articulated first by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in 1972. Growing awareness of the poor social conditions of disabled people, coupled with inspiration from the international civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, the social model provided a powerful articulation of everyday and structural disabling conditions. Like other civil rights movements, expertise was not only held by professionals but with people who had lived experiences of both their bodies and their social, economic, and political conditions.

Impairment, Disability, and Barriers

A key tenet of the social model is the distinction it draws between impairment and disability. Impairment refers to functional differences (seeing differently, moving differently, etc.). Disability refers to processes of disablement – literal or figurative barriers in the world that prevent people living with impairments from enacting their desires, participating fully in and taking ownership of their lives. Advocacy, activism, service and policy were reoriented to focus on removing and dismantling disabling barriers, rather than fixing people. In the hopes of early disability activists, disability oppression would be mitigated.

Locating the problems faced by disabled people in disabling contextual conditions rather than medical conditions was a necessary shift of worldview. The social model’s simplicity and remarkable effectiveness upon implementation led to its widespread adoption. Since its inception, we have seen its broad application in fields such as architecture, employment legislation, cultural production, classrooms, healthcare, and in the World Health Organization definitions of disability (2011).

For more, read the World Health Organization’s World Report on Disability to learn about how different frameworks of disability come together.

The social model paved the way for foundational concepts like accessibility and accommodation, independent living, barrier removal, and disability rights legislation. No model can adequately address the complexity of disabled people’s lives; through critical engagement with its limitations, the social model has supported expanded understandings of disability, particularly those that hold space for chronic pain, chronic and episodic illness, and neurodiversity.