Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
16 results found in Disability Theory.
- Agentive Amplifier
- A framing of technical artefacts, proposed by Oosterlaken and Van Den Hoven, as things that create possibilities a person would not otherwise have — extending, not replacing, the user's own agency. Un…
- Capability Sensitive Design
- A design approach, proposed by Ilse Oosterlaken, that takes human diversity morally seriously and evaluates technologies by how they actually expand or constrain the real opportunities (capabilities) …
- Child Agency
- Child agency is a child's capacity to initiate, shape, direct, and sustain activities - including play, conversation, and social interaction - rather than passively accepting adult or peer control. In…
- Crip World-Making
- Crip world-making, articulated by Robert McRuer and related disability theorists, describes the generative practices through which disabled people make hostile environments liveable - hacking, repurpo…
- Embodied Knowledge (Embodied expertise, Lived knowledge)
- Knowledge that is grounded in bodily experience rather than externally observable behaviour or abstract rule - the kind of knowing a person who stutters has about the tension before a block, a blind p…
- Hermeneutical Injustice
- Hermeneutical injustice, a concept developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a form of epistemic injustice in which a person's experience is unintelligible to themselves or others because the colle…
- Iceberg Theory of Stuttering (Sheehan's iceberg)
- A model proposed by Joseph Sheehan (1970) describing stuttering as an iceberg whose visible behaviours - blocks, repetitions, prolongations - are only a small fraction above the waterline. The much la…
- Loss of Obscurity (Loss of anonymity)
- A concept introduced by Thomas J. Carroll in his 1961 book "Blindness: What It Is, What It Does, and How to Live with It," in which he identified twenty distinct losses that accompany the onset of bli…
- Medical Model of Disability (Medical Model, Deficit Model)
- The medical model of disability is a framework that views disability primarily as a problem located within the individual, a biological deficit or impairment that needs to be fixed, cured, or compensa…
- Misfit
- A concept from disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describing 'an incongruent relationship between two things' - the material mismatch between a body and an environment not built for …
- Neuroqueer Technoscience
- A theoretical framework, developed by Nick Walker and extended in HCI by Barros Pena, Williams and others, that builds on crip technoscience and the neuroqueer paradigm to position neurodivergent peop…
- Normate
- A term coined by disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson to name the cultural figure - the imagined 'normal' body - against which other bodies are measured, valued, and judged deficient. …
- Personhood
- The recognition of a human being as a full person with agency, dignity, self-expression, and moral standing, irrespective of cognitive, physical, or communicative impairments. In dementia care and acc…
- Translated Deaf Self
- A concept coined by Alys Young, Jemina Napier, and Rosemary Oram describing how deaf signers' lifelong experiences of being encountered, represented, and inter-subjectively known by others occur in a …
- Whole-Self (Whole Self)
- A concept from disability justice that frames a disabled person's identity, needs, and preferences as a rich, multidimensional whole — cultural background, lived experiences, interests, relationships,…
- World-Making (Worldmaking)
- World-making, drawing on Nelson Goodman's 'Ways of Worldmaking' and extended in disability scholarship by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, refers to the active construction of shared social worlds throug…