Seeking inclusion through redefining expertise : the changing spatial contours of disability activism in the long 1970s

Abstract

This article focuses on European transnational activism in the long1970s. Using the independent living movement as a case study, itilluminates how new spaces of knowledge production, socialexperience and political activism often emerged from informalcontacts. Such initiatives challenged the medical understanding ofdisability and questioned the expertise of medical and rehabilita-tion personnel: activists fighting for the elimination of spatial seg-regation redefined disability into a social condition and assertedthat the source of expertise was above all the lived experience.More conventional professional spaces of exchange also intensifiedand diversified in this period, as the example of two networksrepresenting people with intellectual and developmental disabil-ities reveals: one fashioned itself as a space of neutral professionalexchange, whereas the other also engaged in activism. Yet anotherinstance of diversification is the coming into being of the world’sfirst cross-disability organization in 1981. The article reveals theideological tensions and practical obstacles that restricted interna-tional exchange and the manifestations of solidarity. In particular, itpoints to the mismatched expectations between activists fromEurope and North America who defined solidarity in terms ofidentity politics, and those from the Global South who tended toequate it with financial aid.