Module 2: Medicalization and Reframing Expertise
Who Gets to Define Disability?
Key Terms: Medicalization and Reframing Expertise
The following key terms are used throughout this module and linked in the glossary:
What is Disability Placeholder
Disability as a phenomenon is subject to multiple framings and contestations. Common sense understandings of disability tend to frame it as an individual physical characteristic that has been medicalized. As such, in the global north, disability is often understood in biomedical terms.
As this module will unpack, alternative framings informed by human rights, social theory, and disabled people’s activism have broadened understandings of disability. Increasingly, these complex and multidimensional framings have shaped formal policy and institutional definitions.
The following examples demonstrate how disability is defined differently across medical, legal, institutional, and activist contexts.
Media Moment
Time: 11 minutes, 29 seconds
In this talk, Jessica Smith reflects on how disability is shaped not only by the body, but by social attitudes, environments, and assumptions about who counts as an expert. Watch the following video here, access it at the link below, or the transcript.
Living in an inaccessible world | Jessica Smith | TEDxGEMSNewMillenniumSchool
Activity
The following questions invite you to reflect on key ideas and examples from Jessica Smith’s talk.
Knowledge that is recognized as authoritative, often based on having certain credentials.
The process through which access to services, resources, or recognition is controlled by institutional or professional authorities.
Knowledge rooted in people's own direct experiences of their body, health, and the world.
The social and institutional power granted to medical professionals, knowledge, and systems to define health, illness, disability, and appropriate responses to them.
A perspective on disability that views disability as an individual problem that needs to be diagnosed, treated, or cured in order to return to the able-bodied norm.
The process of assigning medical meaning to behaviors and conditions, and positioning medical practices as the primary method of treatment or resolution. It often results in the lives of disabled people being imbued in medical meaning.
When something is made real because humans agree that it is real. For example, the value of money is a social construct. Money has no inherent value (e.g. it can't be eaten), but it has value in our society due to human consensus.
