Thanks for writing this. It’s helpful and seems to clear up some of the confusion from Scott’s article.
I’m confused about one thing though: Is there any difference between the Interactionist and Social models? My impression from reading this is that they’re exactly the same except for how they encode words (sometimes one would say “disability” and the other would say “discrimination” but they mean the same thing) but I’m not sure if that’s correct.
I am only familiar with the interactionist model as articulated by Scott. One difference appears to be that the Social Model carves out the category of “disability” to specifically refer to morally wrong ways that society restricts, discriminated against, or omits to accommodate impaired people. It has a moral stance built in. The Interactionist model uses “disability” as a synonym for impairment and doesn’t seem to have an intrinsic moral stance—it just makes a neutral statement that what people can or can’t do has to do with both environment and physical impairment.
Thanks for writing this. It’s helpful and seems to clear up some of the confusion from Scott’s article.
I’m confused about one thing though: Is there any difference between the Interactionist and Social models? My impression from reading this is that they’re exactly the same except for how they encode words (sometimes one would say “disability” and the other would say “discrimination” but they mean the same thing) but I’m not sure if that’s correct.
I am only familiar with the interactionist model as articulated by Scott. One difference appears to be that the Social Model carves out the category of “disability” to specifically refer to morally wrong ways that society restricts, discriminated against, or omits to accommodate impaired people. It has a moral stance built in. The Interactionist model uses “disability” as a synonym for impairment and doesn’t seem to have an intrinsic moral stance—it just makes a neutral statement that what people can or can’t do has to do with both environment and physical impairment.