When the term “social model of disability” was coined by British sociologist Mike Oliver in 1983, it helped form the basis of the disability rights movement. To mark the birth of that movement, as well as the 30th anniversary of the autistic rights movement, our new report reflects on why it is vital that autistic people are always at the centre of autism research. During the 1980s, the term “social model of disability” challenged how society largely regarded disability as a personal tragedy.
Disablement was seen as something that belonged to individual disabled people, with heavily medicalised personal “impairments”. But Oliver argued that disablement came from how society treated disabled people and from the systemic lack of equitable access. The social model of disability ultimately informed disability awareness and equality training.
Not long after, in the early 1990s, as people began having access to the internet, autistic people began finding one another on chat boards and email lists. Around the same time, autobiographical texts written by autistic people began to be published online. They helped introduce the voices of autistic people to neurotypical people for the first time.
However, reflecting the perspective of that period, much of the tone of the writing conveyed the message that autism was a “tragedy” that needed to be mourned. It was against this backdrop that the American autistic rights activist Jim Sinclair gave a seminal speech at the 1993 I.