Speaker
But the other way of looking at disability is as a social condition, that is the social model of disability, which came about as the result of ah disability activism in the 70s, 80s and 90s in the US, UK and across the world, really, that really argues that instead of thinking as disability as inherent to the impairment, impairment is almost separate from disability. I am impaired by my cerebral palsy and the fact that I cannot walk, but I am made disabled by the fact that city planners or architects do not consider my disability in their construction and in their planning. So, you know, there could have been a ramp between A to B or there could have been a lift between A to B. And that is what's disabling me. And that's not even to go into the various kind of social conditions in which that affects people's perceptions of me and things like that. And so when we think to the past, then very often, and this is why when I mentioned earlier how I was kind of preparing for my undergraduate thesis and reading all these texts and thinking, God, this is awful. And the reason why I felt it was awful is because a lot of these authors, consciously or no, were coming scholars, consciously or no, were coming to this idea of disability inherently from a medicalised lens, which is something that I think has been impressed on many people and is inherent, unfortunately, still in many non-disabled people's thinking. And so they would inherently look at evidence of disability and immediately associate that with