Disability in Higher Education

The social justice (or ableist, or disability oppression) model of disability is based on concepts associated with the overall social justice movement in the United States, which borrowed ideas from the separate civil rights, women’s, and New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s (L. A. Bell, 2013). In this model, concepts such as social justice, liberation, and oppression are used to analyze, evaluate, and transform systems of social behavior, discriminatory institutional structures, and cultural practices (M. Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007). The University of Massachusetts Social Justice Education Program has been particularly influential in developing and promoting this model. With the exception of conceptual work introduced by writers associated with the University of Massachusetts program and some research conducted in the United Kingdom, little writing and almost no research in the field of social justice has focused on ableism (Nocella, 2009).