The impact of the social model of disability on contemporary academic,
policy, practice and popular thinking about disability and disabled people
cannot be overstated. It has been transformational in the way in which it
has named and challenged dominant conceptions of disability as
impairment, deficit and inherently individual and tragic. The
reconceptualization of disability as a form of social oppression experienced
on top of impairment (UPIAS 1974, 1975) and as the basis for collective
political action (Oliver 1990) has been revolutionary in its impact.
Reading In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (2016)1
while I was compiling this Book provided a helpful framework to explore my
academic and activist engagement with the social model. I have found
Sharpe's use of multiple understandings of the wake and particularly of
undertaking wake work valuable. For Sharpe the entirety of the meanings of
a wake as:
keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of
something in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening and consciousness
(18)
enable a form of "wake work" as an analytic in academic practice that
'avails us particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imaging the
world' (22). As such "being in the wake" is an ethical choice and
engagement with a history, an evolving body of ideas and with imagined and
as yet unimagined futures.
