Disablism in Housing and Comparative Community Care Discourse - Towards an Interventionist Model of Disability and Interventionist Welfare Regime Theory

Abstract

This paper is presented in two parts. In this part I provide a critique of the socio-biological essentialism that infuses the community care discourses in ?housing studies? and ?comparative studies?. I argue that this biological essentialism has encouraged researchers to accept the common sense assumption that the ?special needs? of disabled people are per se located within the incompetent body/mind. The effect of this has resulted in the construction of a reductionist academic discourse. This propagates the notion that recent policy initiatives taken in Britain and other European countries (which now encourage the regulation of ?special needs? in the home, rather than in the so-called ?institution?) represent some form of cognate ?total change? or ?paradigm shift?. In addition, the paper also challenges ?radical sociologies? of disability that, in per se locating disability outwith the body/mind, lie at the other extreme. To this end, discourses within this mode of thought contend that these policy shift...