Technology and Disability

by Ashley Shew

I’m just bringing some thoughts about the Social Model of Disability over to this platform from Bluesky and then adding some additional thoughts. My background is in philosophy of technology with a hearty dose of interest initially in scientific instrumentation and technological knowledge, so how I think about models might be a little different than how some people approach models of disability in disability studies. I also keep seeing people bemoan the limits of different models of disability.

My personal opinion is that the social model of disability gets both more love and more hate than it deserves. Models (all types of models) are representations with a lot of approximations that present things as less nuanced than reality to help us learn/understand/make sense.

The social model is instrumental in motivating certain types political, material, interpersonal, and structural understanding/action. Other models motivate other types of understanding/action. I find the social model of disability to be useful to contrast with other approaches/models (and what they motivate).

Usually we position the social model against the medical model of disability or charity models. The International Association of Accessibility Professionals has a whole listing of models, upon which people seeking accessibility certification are tested — and there are more models beyond this represented in disability studies literature. Models are good for comparative work and reshaping understanding if people have only ever tacitly inherited a particular lens or ideas about disability.

Ultimately I’m not super interested in fighting over models (or over which models are “correct” or feel right). I understand models as approximate representations and not perfect or even accurate descriptions of how all things are.

In other words, I’m not ontologically committed to the social model. I think the social model is instrumental toward action. It gives us stuff to do!

Does the model help you figure some stuff out? Then it’s a good model. Does this mean it’s the absolute fundamental truth? No.

No model is meant to represent all features of the world. Models are meant to show larger relationships or to help us figure out how things could be working in relationship to each other. Models are understanding aids. Models often simplify the larger picture to isolate out phenomena to help us understand relationships.

Here I think of work from philosophy of instrumentation on physical models, like orreries (as Davis Baird discusses in his chapter on Model Knowledge in Thing Knowledge). Orreries show the movement of planets around the sun, help explain the heliocentric model of the universe, and help predict planetary motion. We don’t critique orreries because they fail to explain or account for every part of our Solar System. They do a good job of modeling in a way to help people see the relationships and bring better illustration and understanding.

I know models of disability aren’t exactly like orreries, but I also think we can get caught up in the weeds wondering what the “true” model of disability might be, when we can point to different models to explain different things (or the actions/motivations of different actors in a system). I do think some models are better than others. You can imagine an orrery with things arranged quite differently, and it not working as well to aid in understanding or prediction, or with pieces that map things correctly and other parts that are out of whack (so works to predict some things and not others). We should care about what understanding and action our models convey.

Models of disability help us understand how we might arrange our disabled universes differently — how different understandings can conflict, can harm, can move us toward different modes of action, can provide different avenues of remedy, address, and action, can identify different people as authorities/experts. They help us think things out. But they will always lack nuance.

These are thinking aids, not absolute truths.

In this way, I love the social model: it’s useful as a teaching aid and can help students see outside of the medical model really clearly. It’s also useful toward productive action: the social model, in identifying disability as existing between the world and people (and not located in individual disabled bodies), tells us that there are a lot of barriers created by society that we can address by changing how things are structured and people are treated within our systems. Even when the social model can’t address issues of individual pain very well or focus as clearly on larger political arrangements, doing social model work still improves many things in its barrier-removal mindset. It’s an especially important model for accessibility professionals to accomplish their work in ways that are less microaggressive to disabled people.

But I don’t especially “believe in” the social model in the sense of being committed to the social model as the one true model. I’m rather partial to Alison Kafer’s political-relational model of disability in how I think about disability community and action, but that’s not usually where I start when I teach or talk to large groups.

Sidenote: I find it interesting that the IAAP doesn’t list the political-relational model as one of the models it lists (in its testing materials or credentialing process), even though you see the political-relational model pop up really frequently in disability studies classes (over and above some of the others their material covers). I always wonder if that’s intentional: a professional group specifically doesn’t want to highlight that disability is always political. But professional groups are also always political. And don’t want to be seen that way.