Disability studies provides a space to explore questions like these:

 

How has disability been defined in various historical moments, in various cultures and eras? 

 

While impairment has unquestionably been a frequent experience throughout human history, has disability -- the construction of impairment as a generic social category -- been a historical constant, or is it a modern invention? 

 

What social ideologies, cultural systems, and societal arrangements have shaped the meaning and experience of disability? 

 

How has disability been defined or represented in cultural and artistic productions, public laws and policies, modern professional practices and in everyday life?

Are the medical and social models of disability incompatible, or (how) can scholars reconcile and utilize them both?

 

What existing theoretical models from other related interdisciplinary fields (gender studies, for instance, or American studies or medical anthropology) may be brought to bear on the new study of disability, with what benefits, modifications and difficulties of translation?

 

How do all these questions pertain to the development and
implementation of effective disability policy?

 

The Center for Independent Living brought students and those in the community with disabilities together for ongoing service provision and advocacy; it was the model for the first national legislation funding such centers.  The national and international disability movement was heavily influenced by Berkeley disability organizations. 

 

For several decades, UC Berkeley was one of the two or three major universities with faculty engaged in disability policy research.  The World Institute on Disability, the premiere research organization run by people with disabilities, was started here.  A strong cooperative relationship between WID and the School of Public Health resulted in the development of the Ed Roberts Doctoral and Post-doctoral Fellowships in Disability and Rehabilitation Research, a program that for several years brought scholars in to teach an array of disability studies courses and that has now been revived.

 

Nationally prominent community organizations nearby (such as the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and Berkeley Planning Associates) offer strong resources upon which campus personnel and programs have drawn. The Bancroft Library's oral history and archives project on the disability movement is a new resource of growing national importance for scholars in the developing interdisciplinary field of disability studies.