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 long 1970s. Using the independent living movement as a case study, it illuminates how new spaces of knowledge production, social experience and political activism often emerged from informal contacts. Such initiatives challenged the medical understanding of disability and questioned the expertise of medical and rehabilitation personnel: activists fighting for the elimination of spatial segregation redefined disability into a social condition and asserted that the source of expertise was above all the lived experience. More conventional professional spaces of exchange also intensified and diversified in this period, as the example of two networks representing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities reveals: one fashioned itself as a space of neutral professional exchange, whereas the other also engaged in activism. Yet another instance of diversification is the coming into being of the world’s first cross-disability organization in 1981. The article reveals the ideological tensions and practical obstacles that restricted international exchange and the manifestations of solidarity. In particular, it points to the mismatched expectations between activists from Europe and North America who defined solidarity in terms of identity politics, and those from the Global South who tended to equate it with financial aid.