Defining the Boundaries of Disability

Licia Carlson is Professor of Philosophy at Providence College, USA. She is the author of a book on philosophy and intellectual disability and has co-edited volumes on disability and moral philosophy, and phenomenology and the arts. She has published numerous articles and chapters in the philosophy of disability, bioethics, philosophy of music, and feminist philosophy. Her current research interests include the ethics of genetic testing, and the intersection of philosophy, music, and disability. Matthew C. Murray is the Senior Project Adviser for the Growthpolicy.org project at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Providence College, USA. Matthew is actively researching and publishing in the areas of critical theories of justice and their effects on the ideas of and applications of distributive and social justice.

Introduction: What does it mean to claim “we are all disabled”? PART 1: Theoretical considerations 1. Power, disability, and the academic production of knowledge 2. Depending on the undependable: Disability, fragility, and instability 3. The universal view of disability and its danger to the civil rights model 4. On (not) deserving disadvantage: What kind of difference does “disability” make? 5. Being and deafness: Examining ontology and ethics within the dialectic of hearing-loss and deaf-gain and deafness-and-disability PART 2: Spaces, representations, and lived boundaries 6. Poems 7. “We are all disabled”: Feathers, continuities, and a neglected musical argument? 8. Robinson Crusoe and Peter the Wild Boy: What Daniel Defoe inadvertently tells us about disability 9. “We are all disabled”: The conundrum of problems and solutions 10. Borderlands and neurodiversity: Aren´t we all humans? 11. We are all disabled, until we are not 12. Thoughts on precarity, disablement, and risk during COVID-19 13. Toward disability justice in a pandemic world