Critical Understanding of Critical Disability Studies: Personal Reflections and the Indian Context By Anshika Shukla

The very first shift in my thinking occurred before a single lecture had been delivered. At the orientation session preceding the course, Sandeep and Ankita introduced us to the foundational structure and expectations of the programme. It was only when Sandeep themselves disclosed their visual disability later, during the first session, as a deliberate act to establish the course’s ethos, that I became aware of it at all. This moment of disclosure was not incidental; it was intentional, serving to establish the central principle of Critical Disability Studies (CDS): that disability scholarship must be conducted not on disabled people, but in collaboration with them (Goodley, 2017).

This experience prompted a profound realisation about what genuine inclusion can look like in practice. Accessibility tools, collaborative pedagogy, and thoughtfully designed institutional structures can meaningfully integrate individuals who are otherwise excluded. Too often, the identity of a person with a disability is reduced to their perceived limitations, obscuring the depth of knowledge, perspective, and intellect they bring to intellectual and social life. Sandeep’s presence as a course instructor challenged this reductive framing immediately as I encountered them first as a highly knowledgeable educator, and only subsequently as a person with a disability. All the sessions that followed were, in one way or another, woven together to reinforce a single argument: that disability does not arise from personal deficit, but from systems that fail to accommodate human diversity. Disability inclusion, therefore, should be foundational to how institutions are designed, not an accessory right added as an afterthought.

My reflections here centre primarily on the opening sessions of the course, which established the conceptual terrain of Critical Disability Studies and explored how engagement with CDS might deepen disability inclusion in India. What follows is a synthesis drawing on elements across several sessions, much in the spirit of the Möbius strip metaphor offered by Goodley et al. (2021), which represents the endlessly intertwined relationship between the material and immaterial dimensions of human life. The undeniable intersectional bonds that any individual shares with their environment, often encompassing people, culture, language, institutions, identities, and ideas, whether material or abstract, have significantly expanded and complicated the way I previously understood disability.

At its most foundational level, Critical Disability Studies invites a critical interrogation of disability itself as a category. It moves beyond the prevalent and increasingly discredited medical model, which locates disability within the individual body as a problem to be fixed, to accommodate sociopolitical and cultural contexts (Oliver, 1990; Shakespeare, 2006). CDS also insists on acknowledging the layered nature of inclusion and exclusion, recognising how disability intersects with other axes of identity such as gender, caste, class, and race (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). Crucially, the arguments within CDS are not limited to challenging overt structural barriers or openly hostile behaviours. They also attend to the subtler, more insidious ways in which certain people are rendered outsiders, made to feel as though they are peering in through a window at a world that was not built for them. These subtleties are dehumanising in their own right, erasing the lived experiences and emotional realities of disabled individuals.

This attention to the subtle was introduced early in the course through a discussion of language. Everyday linguistic phrases, professional labels, and culturally significant terms all carry embedded assumptions about disability that frequently go unexamined. Consider the common phrase blind faith, a phrase that implicitly equates blindness with the absence of rational judgement, encoding a derogatory assumption about blind individuals’ cognitive capacity within ordinary speech (Titchkosky, 2007). At the other end of the spectrum lies the term Divyāṅg, institutionalised in India by the government as an ostensibly respectful alternative label for persons with disabilities. Meaning “one who possesses a divine body part,” the term frames disability as a kind of supernatural power or celestial gift. While seemingly positive in intent, such framing is harmful precisely because it dehumanises: it denies the mortality, vulnerability, and socially manufactured challenges faced by disabled persons, and by casting disability as divine, it risks erasing the need for care, sensitivity, and structural redress (Addlakha et al., 2017). These two examples illustrate the spectrum along which disability is culturally imagined, oscillating between total incapacity and mythologised exceptionalism, with neither pole leaving room for the actual lived experiences of disabled people.

CDS does not propose a wholesale abandonment of prior scholarship on disability. Rather, it builds critically upon earlier models: the medical model, the social model, rehabilitation frameworks, viewing them through the lenses of contemporary feminist theory, postcolonial studies, critiques of capitalism, and analyses of political power (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009; Goodley, 2017). The aim is not to discard what came before, but to interrogate it, learn from its exclusions, and use those insights to orient future work toward genuinely diverse and intersectional forms of inclusion, including, importantly, challenging the reproduction of exclusionary practices within disability communities themselves.

Conversations around accessibility further reinforced this critical orientation. Accessibility was consistently framed not as a problem to be managed or a concession to be granted, but as a matter of social justice (Hamraie, 2017). The question is not how to allow someone entry into a space not designed for them, but rather why the space was not designed to be inclusive from the outset. This distinction matters enormously. Accessible design integrated at the conception and construction stage of buildings, curricula, technologies, and institutions is categorically different from accessibility features added retrospectively as remedial supplements , the difference between structural inclusion and ornamental accommodation.

A compelling example of what sustained institutional commitment to accessibility can produce in India is found in the initiatives of former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dr D.Y. Chandrachud. On December 3, 2022, International Day of Persons with Disabilities, CJI Chandrachud constituted the Supreme Court Committee on Accessibility, with a mandate to conduct a comprehensive audit of the physical and functional access to the Supreme Court premises for persons with disabilities (LiveLaw, 2022). Chaired by Justice S. Ravindra Bhat, the committee employed a multifaceted methodology that included physical audits of the court’s infrastructure, operational evaluations, and extensive stakeholder consultations with disability rights experts, advocates, litigants, and court staff (Supreme Court of India, 2023). The committee presented its comprehensive findings on October 16, 2023, accompanied by a series of recommendations aimed at dismantling barriers to access, covering everything from infrastructural modifications to the introduction of assistive technologies and equal opportunity policies (CABE Foundation, 2023).

It is well-documented that Justice Chandrachud had a deeply personal connection to disability: both his daughters have a form of locomotor disability and use wheelchairs (Supreme Court Observer, 2024). He himself publicly acknowledged this, noting that his daughters transformed the way he sees the world. This is not to suggest that his judicial and administrative efforts were driven by personal interest alone. Rather, it underscores how lived proximity to disability can meaningfully bridge gaps in institutional understanding and provide both the motivation and direction for systemic change, particularly for communities that frequently remain invisible to policy and design. Justice Chandrachud’s engagement with disability also produced a substantive body of jurisprudence, including rulings that challenged the over-medicalisation of disability assessments, upheld the right to reasonable accommodation under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution, and directed that accessibility guidelines under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPD) Act, 2016 be treated as mandatory rather than merely recommendatory (Supreme Court Observer, 2024).

What these reflections collectively point toward is a vision of disability inclusion that is structural, intersectional, and rooted in justice rather than charity. Critical Disability Studies, as a field and as a practice, demands not only that we redesign the material environments in which disabled people live and work, but that we examine and dismantle the cultural, linguistic, and institutional assumptions that render disability either a personal tragedy or a divine gift, neither of which acknowledges disabled people as full, complex human beings with the right to participate in the decisions that shape their lives. Whether through the careful linguistic choices we make in everyday speech, the architecture of the institutions we build, or the jurisprudence produced by the highest courts in the land, the work of inclusion is never incidental. It is always, at its core, a question of who gets to belong, and who, in the words of the disability rights movement, gets to have a say.

Across all the dimensions explored in this course, linguistic, architectural, legal, medical and pedagogical, one principle remains non-negotiable, as it has been for the global disability rights movement since James Charlton gave it its definitive articulation in 1998: “Nothing About Us Without Us” (Charlton, 1998).

References

Addlakha, R., Price, J., & Heidari, S. (2017). Disability and sexuality: Claiming sexual and reproductive rights. Reproductive Health Matters, 25(50), 4–9.

CABE Foundation. (2023, October 16). Supreme Court unveils report with recommendations for better accessibility for persons with disabilities, senior citizens and women. https://www.cabefoundation.com/2023/10/supreme-court-unveils-report-with.html

Charlton, J. I. (1998). Nothing about us without us: Disability oppression and empowerment. University of California Press.

Goodley, D. (2017). Disability studies: An interdisciplinary introduction (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2021). Provocations for critical disability studies. Disability & Society, 34(6), 972–997.

Hamraie, A. (2017). Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. University of Minnesota Press.

LiveLaw. (2022, December 5). CJI DY Chandrachud constitutes ‘Supreme Court Committee on Accessibility’ to ensure access for persons with disability in justice system. https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/cji-dy-chandrachud-constitutes-supreme-court-committee-on-accessibility-215764

Meekosha, H., & Shuttleworth, R. (2009). What’s so ‘critical’ about critical disability studies? Australian Journal of Human Rights, 15(1), 47–75.

Oliver, M. (1990). The politics of disablement. Macmillan.

Shakespeare, T. (2006). Disability rights and wrongs. Routledge.

Supreme Court of India. (2023). Report of the Supreme Court Committee on Accessibility. https://www.sci.gov.in/accessibility-post/

Supreme Court Observer. (2024, November 20). Seven judgements on disability rights authored by D.Y. Chandrachud. https://www.scobserver.in/journal/seven-judgements-on-disability-rights-authored-by-d-y-chandrachud/

Titchkosky, T. (2007). Reading and writing disability differently: The textured life of embodiment. University of Toronto Press.