Disability Politics

by Jane Campbell, Michael Oliver, Mike Oliver

This powerful book presents a series of perspectives on the process of self-organisation of disabled people which has taken place over the last thirty years. The 1980s saw a transformation in our understanding of the nature of disability, and consequently the kinds of policies and services necessary to ensure the full economic and social integration of disabled people. At the heart of this transformation has been the rise in the number of organisations controlled and run by disabled people themselves. Through a series of interviews with disabled people who have been centrally involved in the rise of the disability movement, the authors present a new collective history which throws light on the politics of the 1980s, and offers insights into future political developments in the 1990s and on into the twenty-first century.

Genres: Disability, Academia, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 11, 1996

About the author

Jane Campbell was born in Hoylake (Wirral) in 1942. In 1948 her family moved to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and four years later Jane went to boarding school in Cape Town. In 1959 she spent 18 months at Cape Town University before reading English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. After marrying a fellow undergraduate, she moved to Bermuda. In 1980 she returned to Oxford where she took a post-graduate degree in Applied Social Science and trained at the Institute of Group Analysis. She has had a Private Practice in Oxford since then and for 20 years worked as a co-director of a part-time postgraduate training leading to an MSc Group Psychotherapy (OBU). In 2017, she sent a short story, “Cat-Brushing,” to the London Review of Books, who published it. She has now written a collection of short stories about the experiences of older women which will be published by riverrun / Quercus in the UK in July 2022. Grove Atlantic will publish the US edition in August 2022. She is now living in Bermuda again for much of the year where her four children live.