The Society for Disability Studies is a transnational

International

----International mostly means something that involves more than one country. The term international as a word means involvement of, interaction between or encompassing more than one nation, or generally beyond national boundaries...

 academic network of disability studies

Disability studies

Disability studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary academic field focusing on the roles of people with disabilities in history, literature, social policy, law, architecture, and other disciplines. Although it has many antecedents, disability studies began to flourish toward the end of the...

 practitioners. It often abbreviates its name to SDS even though such an abbreviation often continues to be used by academics and political scientists to describe the Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

 organisation in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The society's overall goal is to promote disability studies as a serious academic discipline

Academic discipline

An academic discipline, or field of study, is a branch of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined , and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties to...

 on par with philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, the social sciences

Social sciences

Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...

, and similar fields. .

The society holds an annual conference and publishes a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, the Disability Studies Quarterly. The journal is published exclusively online.
Two awards have been established by the society "to honor individuals who have shown dedication to Disability studies": the Senior Scholar Award and the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies.

Definition of disability studies

In 1993 the society adopted an official definition of "Disability Studies":

"... examines the policies and practices of all societies to understand the social, rather than the physical or psychological determinants of the experience of disability. Disability Studies has been developed to disentangle impairments from the myths, ideology and stigma that influence social interaction and social policy. The scholarship challenges the idea that the economic and social statuses and the assigned roles of people with disabilities are the inevitable outcomes of their condition."

External links

• http://www.disstudies.org (Official website)
• http://www.dsq-sds.org/ (Disability Studies Quarterly Journal website)