Social inequalities associated with disability are a disturbing feature of contemporary Western societies. The pervasiveness of this structural oppression means that millions of lives are overshadowed by disablement. This study sets out to situate this fact theoretically, historically, and geographically.
Broadly speaking, disability is the socially imposed state of exclusion which physically impaired individuals may be forced to endure. Such a view contrasts with popular, or common sense, understandings which see the experience of disablement as `second nature' to impaired people.
An important claim of the thesis is that disability is a socio-spatial oppression which social theory must no longer ignore. Further, historical materialism provides the explanatory foundations for a social theory of disability. It is asserted from the outset that the form of historical materialism needed to achieve this task is one which takes the human body and space to be central theoretical considerations. Accordingly, the study uses a spatially-focused historical materialism to analyse the question of disability, and does this through carefully designed empirical case studies of the everyday experience of disablement in different times and places.
The study asks the question:
How have changes in the socio-spatial organisation of society affected the lived experience of physical impairment?
A response is made in the form of a comparative analysis of the lived experience of impairment in feudal England and colonial (nineteenth-century) Melbourne. Five important data sets exist which relate to the experience of impairment in both societies, and these are consulted in the course of the study. The most substantial empirical resource is the set of case records (1850-1900) of the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society, an important philanthropic organisation which operated in colonial Melbourne.
The research demonstrates that socio-spatial changes affect the lived experience of impairment by transforming the material structures of everyday life. It is argued that past transformations in the mode of production have had profound social consequences for physically impaired people. In particular, the analysis shows that the socio-spatial organisation of industrial capitalism was an oppressive source of disablement for physically impaired people. The study concludes that a transformation in the present mode of production (capitalism) is a necessary first step towards ending the oppression of disability
