A Cartography of Philosophy on/of Disability

Compared to social sciences and other humanistic disciplines in which the field of Disability Studies gained legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the An-glosphere, philosophy has been somewhat slow to engage with disability. Disabil-ity Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has benefited from the contribution of many different fields of research; sociology, art, anthropology, architecture, cul-tural and literary studies, law, history, postcolonial and decolonial studies, psy-chology, education, sport studies, science and technology studies, sexuality stud-ies, etc., as shown by the variety of international handbooks published (Albrecht & Bury 2003; Berghs, Chataika, El-Lahib 2019; Blanck 2020; Brown, Maroto, Pettinicchio 2023; Chataika & Goodley 2024; Davis 2013; Ellis, Kent, Cousins 2024; Hadley & McDonald 2020; Howe, Jensen-Moulton, Lerner, Straus 2016; Ned, Rivas Velarde, Singh, Swartz, Soldatic 2024; Rembis, Kudlick, Nielsen 2018; Shuttleworth & Mona 2022; Watson, Roulstone, Thomas 2012). A signif-icant tenet of Disability Studies, which is relevant to mention here, is the remark that disability, even though not always explicitly addressed, pervades nonetheless culture, literature, and scientific endeavour –as a concept, image, or metaphorical crutch (Snyder & Mitchell 2000; Snyder, Brueggemann, Garland-Thomson, 2002). Despite this abundance, however, disability is still largely unrecognised as a topic of academic interest, especially in the Humanities –the phenomenon that David Bolt and Claire Penketh define as “disciplinary avoidance” (2015).