This volume offers the first collection of Critical Evidence scholarship. By using the moniker, “Critical Evidence,” we mean to denote a school of thought that is quite broad but shares certain features. First, Critical Evidence scholars maintain that social conditions matter to what an ideal system of evidence will look like. The quality, depth, and breadth of knowledge inputs affect the quality of the knowledge produced through the application of rules in an adjudicative process. Critical Evidence thus questions one fundamental assumption of the rationalist tradition in evidence, namely, that the system generally achieves “rectitude of decision through correct application of valid substantive laws” and “rational weighing of evidence” by an “impartial decisionmaker.”

The current practice of disability studies largely groups itself according to various “models” of disability, such as the “medical,” “social,” “identity,” and “minority.” While insightful, each is incomplete: some focus on the medical component of disability, others on its social implications, and yet others on its personal significance. The present chapter proposes an account of disability grounded in Thomistic anthropology. In this system, an individual is a human being insofar as he or she possesses a particular kind of essence or nature. Given this nature, a person has certain natural abilities that, if certain other requisite conditions are met, allow the person to perform typical operations. Disability – and the closely related term “impairment” – concerns inabilities to perform given activities and various consequent inequities that may arise. The “Thomistic model” proposed aims to incorporate insights from prevailing models of disability and, thus, to enrich contemporary disability studies through the application of Thomistic philosophy.

Before examining how the regulation of bioethical matters impacts the equal right to live in the world for people with impairments, Chapter 1 elaborates on key concepts relevant for the book’s later chapters: disability, eugenics, ableism, and neoliberalism. It begins with a critical discussion of the medical and social models of disability, the two dominant approaches to understanding disability in disability studies. The chapter also highlights the troubled recent history of eugenics, the concept of ableism and the persistence of ableist policies and practices, as well as the importance and shortcomings of disability rights laws in furthering disability justice and equality.

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s central premise: disabled people have as much right to live in the world as the non-disabled. It introduces the human rights and critical disability studies methods used to interrogate the problem of disability discrimination throughout the life cycle, especially at the beginning and end of life. Along with providing an overview, the introductory chapter argues that the book is particularly needed because disability equal rights struggles remain marginal in mainstream bioethics and law.

The introduction outlines four major tasks of this study: (1) to present evidence of disability-based intergroup economic disparity in the United States; (2) to engage the lived experiences of individuals and communities experiencing multiple simultaneous axes of oppression, including disability-based oppression; (3) to contribute to emerging understandings of the importance of intersectionality to economic research and policy; and (4) to contribute to stratification economics in applied terms through direct engagement with policy proposals for a federal jobs guarantee and federal “baby bonds” program. It provides an overview of disability and the US economy, disability and economic research methods, common models of disability, and the challenge of race/disability analogies.

Economic study of inequality and stratification often disregards the lived experiences of multiply marginalized people and communities, in particular Black disabled people. Chapter 1 makes a case for a different form of economic analysis that follows the lead of Black disability justice activists working for social equality. The argument proceeds in three parts. The first section of the chapter explains stratification economics and positions disability-based inequality within contemporary accounts of intergroup economic disparity. The second section introduces disability justice and activists who use the term to mark an alternative to traditional rights-based theories of social progress. It subsequently offers a justification and theoretical framework for conducting intersectional economic research on racism, misogyny, and ableism. The third and final section outlines the necessary components of our strategy for integrating disability-based analysis into the work of stratification economics, identifying essential steps that will guide our analysis of employment, health, wealth, and education in subsequent chapters.

My account mimics my meandering academic career. I address questions that have animated me and continue to animate me. As a psychologist, I am interested in who knows or claims to know what about whom and to what ends. Influenced both by conventional scientific psychology and by psychoanalytic thinking, my work in disability studies with people excluded in many ways, like epistemically, has helped me to think deeply about different kinds of knowledge. This work is embedded in an activist orientation; I try to contribute to social change but am also aware of my knowledge limitations and identity in achieving change. Psychoanalytic thinking helps me think about difficult processes in community work and unpleasant possibilities of my work and that of my colleagues – our investments, for example, being in marginalized fields may, paradoxically, encourage us to resist these fields becoming less so, as we reproduce what we know. I am uncertain about much of what I think and know, but paradoxically again this uncertainty is what makes the work of discovery and the trial and error of social engagement fresh, interesting, and fun. This is a huge privilege.

In the last ten years, as nineteenth-century Americanists have turned their attention to disability as an analytical category for their own field, they have used and developed new tools and modes of analysis to map a much more complex disability landscape. In this chapter, I turn to Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) to ask what a fictionalized autobiography written from the experience of a disabled Black woman can show us about the complexity and limitations of our critical understandings of disability in the period. Whereas we have been trained to look for disability in nineteenth-century American literature as represented flatly and relegated to the margins, Wilson keeps disability at the center of her narrative. Such a reading employs the method of historical cripistemology – that is, it begins from the experiences and knowledge of disabled people in the past – here, Harriet Wilson’s – to reframe our understanding of literature and culture. In Our Nig, Wilson uses her own experience to break with familiar Black and white forms for narrating disability in the antebellum period. Taking up Our Nig from this perspective demonstrates how careful attention to disability in nineteenth-century American literature and culture – particularly literature written by disabled people – can help us recover the broader scope and greater variety of disability representation in the period, as well as its import for helping us reenvision how we read literature in the period more broadly.

This chapter examines the representation of illness and impairment in various works of fiction, poetry, and memoir to demonstrate the creative possibilities of disability. Where literary uses of disability have historically been thought to denote suffering, corruption, social failure, or inspirational and redemptive lessons aimed at non-disabled readers, recent scholarship has explored disability’s generative relation to structures of plot and to poetics as well as its epistemological effects, constituting new forms of knowledge. The chapter spotlights three texts that explicitly challenge tropes of deviance and lack and foreground bodymind anomalousness as the source of creative expression and knowing.

This chapter covers literary representations of prostheses in a wide range of historical periods to outline the difference that literature can make in challenging the dominant technological narrative and reframing it in terms of human uses. Taking as emblematic a pair of short stories by William Faulkner (“The Leg”) and Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People”), Hall argues that these works do more than simply register shifts in prosthetic technology, but also challenge normalizing discourses through forms that “resist any urge toward stable order, whether narrative, social, or bodily.” “Language and storytelling are important to our understanding of prosthesis,” Hall argues, “because anxieties, hopes, and fantasies about enablement, modification, and enhancement, as well as the powerful fiction of the ‘normate,’ are reinforced but also renegotiated in literary and cultural spaces.”