Knowing with the Disability Community: Building a Disability Standpoint for Health Policy Research

Abstract:For the last eighteen months, I have worked with a group of disability and health policy researchers. I began this interview-based project trying to learn how these researchers’ disability identities shaped their work. How did their disability standpoint contribute to the liberatory nature of their research? I found that the disability standpoint of these researchers was in fact hard-won and grew not just out of their own disability experiences but out of their connections with the larger disability community. These connections, for the most part, helped researchers come to “claim crip,” and that later influenced their research.