Charting the progress and future directions of disability studies in human geography: A comprehensive systematic review dating back to 1980s

Abstract

Given that both disability studies and human geography focus on the interaction between society and space and play a significant role in aiding urban planners and geographers to explore and enhance urban inclusivity from the perspective of people with disabilities (PwDs), disability studies in human geography have progressively evolved into a distinct and independent branch of research. Considering the relative scarcity of comprehensive review studies in this area, this paper provided a comprehensive and systematic review, focusing on two classification logics: Related human geography subdomains and study subjects. This comprehensive review obtained 3929 papers from the Web of Science in the relevant fields. Through human scanning, we selected 370 papers that specifically addressed human geography with a focus on PwDs. Our systematic review analysed the number of publications over the years, cross-national empirical studies, the categories of disability, and the focus areas within these studies, thus outlining the current state of disability studies in human geography. Specifically, this study examined 14 subdomains within human geography that are pertinent to disability studies, including social geography, urban geography, political geography, transport geography, health geography, and economic geography. We summarised the current state of research, identified deficiencies, and outlined future directions. Furthermore, we identified the key limitation in existing studies—predominantly treating PwDs as a homogeneous group that needs to have a more nuanced differentiation. Such studies focus on more recognisable disabilities, whereas atypical groups like autism spectrum disorder, specific learning difficulties, and communication difficulties remain underexplored. There is also a notable imbalance in global research coverage, with limited studies in developing regions and rural areas. Lastly, the results indicate a lack of longitudinal temporal research and a failure to fully utilise emerging technologies and multi-source data to better capture the diverse needs of PwDs in existing studies.