What is Research on Disability? Looking Backward to See Forward

Abstract

Designating disability as an object of research was both the condition for the emergence of the field of disability theology and a paradoxical source of its continuing aporias. One such problematic conceptual dead end is the division in the academic field of religion and disability that has arisen between traditional theological discourse and social scientific approaches to investigating disability. By highlighting the inherent instability of disability definitions on which much social scientific research rests, this paper invites renewed engagement with history and tradition as conversation partners for disability theology. By proposing a critical hermeneutic of tradition, it aims to widen and integrate the range of methodological approaches available to theological investigators of disability.Academic disciplines rest on shared internal agreements about appropriate investigative methods and protocols that build up a clearer picture of some object or domain of study. But disciplines are kept alive by debate about which investigative methods are most appropriate for the subject being studied. Those of us who work in disability theology seldom pause to notice the oddity of taking "disability" as an object of study. Is this object an entity in the world, like an apple? Is it an experience? And if it is an experience, is disability something that some people live and other people observe from the outside? Or perhaps disability is a phenomenon that impinges on each one of us in some way, even if many people do not notice it? Who is authorized to answer this question, and so to define what is and is not a disability?This article highlights the contested and polyvalent definitions of disability in current popular and academic discourse as a starting point from which meta-questions about appropriate methods for investigating disability can be revisited. My aim is to complexify the methodological approaches available in disability theology while at the same time looking for the