What is the Point of ‘Critical Disability Studies’?

This week I discovered two academics specialising in ‘Critical Disability Theory’ and ‘Critical Disability Studies’ while researching the British Academy (BA), “the UK’s national for the humanities and social sciences”. They are Dr Donna McCormack, a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and Dan Goodley, a Professor of Disability Studies and Education at the University of Sheffield.

The BA received just under £340 million from taxpayers between 2021 and 2025, and claims “Anyone seeking to understand and solve our world’s complex challenges… needs the insights and expertise of our disciplines” – so you might expect some groundbreaking work from these researchers, greatly improving the lives of disabled people.

But wait until you see the garbage being produced by McCormack and Goodley, both of whom are promoted on the YouTube and social media output of the BA – clearly intended as shining examples of academics in the humanities and social sciences.

McCormack, a “they/them”, received £196,016.22 from the BA for “their” project Doing Disability Futures, which “uses art and storytelling to share lived experiences and imagine fairer futures”.

The project has its own Instagram page, with posts about “Reclaiming Neuroqueer Bodies, Knowledges and Futures” and “the impossibility of disability justice without a free Palestine”.

If that is not bizarre enough, McCormack’s academic profile reads: “I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network.” Furthermore, ‘Monster Theory’ is listed among McCormack’s PhD projects.

McCormack is also “currently developing a project on Queer Fish”.

Professor Dan Goodley is objectionable in a different way. His work is complete gibberish, yet he speaks as though he has discovered the theory of relativity and wishes to explain it to a far less intelligent audience. You can see this from an 11-minute video the BA has uploaded of Goodley, in which he comes out with nonsense such as the following:

Embracing disability as a deeply intellectual source of authority can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university. Disability might feed into a wider practice of what I term depathologisation. Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists; depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource. Depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice – a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change. So, depathologisation reframes disability as a radical and disruptive subject that feeds into a wider community of practice involved with contesting intersectional oppressions associated with ability, but also with race, with gender, sexuality, caste and class.

In 2024 the Academy made Goodley a “Fellow”, although he has not received funding from it.

He has, however, received approximately £2.4 million in taxpayer-funded grants from UKRI, via its subsidiaries the Economic and Social Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Research England.

Unfortunately, McCormack and Goodley are not isolated examples of useless research labelled as ‘disability studies’. On the UK Research and Innovation grant database of taxpayer-funded studies, I found other dubious grants, including:

• a PhD titled ‘“On Disability”: Using my composite novel to depict a phenomenological account of the “Disability Experience” through auto-ethnographic reflections’;
• a project using “methodology of analytic philosophy, including the latest frameworks in social epistemology, to examine the ways disability injustice is linked to the kind of ignorance I’m calling ‘abled ignorance’”; and
• a PhD titled ‘ONCE UPON A CUR(S)E: Disability and fractured prosthesis in contemporary fairy tale retellings’.

How is any of this helping disabled people?

This research is not only pointless but insulting and wasteful when the money could be so much better spent elsewhere.

Charlotte Gill regularly publishes about the use of taxpayers’ money to fund Left-wing causes and Left-wing researchers in Woke Waste, her Substack. You can subscribe here.