18/08/2026
Turner’s Disability:
A History of Resistance - offers a revisionist account of disability history by foregrounding the political, social, and cultural strategies through which disabled people have resisted marginalisation across different historical periods. Rather than treating disability as a static biomedical category, Turner situates it within shifting regimes of power, welfare, labour, and citizenship. His central argument is that disabled people have consistently enacted forms of resistance both organised and everyday that challenge dominant narratives of dependency and passivity.
Drawing on archival sources, legal records, institutional histories, and personal testimonies, Turner traces how disabled people negotiated and contested the constraints imposed by charity models, poor‑law systems, and medical authority. This aligns with broader historiographical shifts that emphasise disabled people’s agency within oppressive structures (e.g., Barnes & Mercer, 2010; Burch & Joyner, 2017). Turner highlights how disabled individuals resisted institutionalisation, organised mutual‑aid networks, asserted labour rights, and reclaimed cultural narratives that had historically cast them as objects of pity or moral failure.
A key contribution of the book is its attention to everyday resistance, a concept resonant with James C. Scott’s work on subaltern politics. Turner shows how disabled people used negotiation, refusal, humour, community solidarity, and strategic self‑presentation to navigate hostile environments. These micro‑acts of resistance, he argues, are historically significant and form the connective tissue between early informal activism and later formal disability rights movements.
Turner also situates disability resistance within broader political transformations, including the rise of welfare states, industrial capitalism, and contemporary rights‑based frameworks. His analysis demonstrates how disabled people have shaped — not merely been shaped by — policy and public discourse. This perspective contributes to ongoing debates in disability studies about the relationship between structural oppression, identity formation, and collective action (Shakespeare, 2013; Goodley, 2016).
Overall, Turner’s work reframes disability history as a dynamic field of contestation, highlighting the continuity of resistance across centuries and offering a counter‑narrative to traditional accounts that marginalise disabled voices. It is a valuable text for scholars examining disability, social movements, and the politics of inclusion.
📚 Indicative References (APA 7)
- Barnes, C., & Mercer, G. (2010). Exploring disability (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
- Burch, S., & Joyner, L. (2017). Unspeakable: The story of disability history. University of Chicago Press.
- Goodley, D. (2016). Disability studies: An interdisciplinary introduction (2nd ed.). SAGE.
- Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press.
- Shakespeare, T. (2013). Disability rights and wrongs revisited (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Turner, D. (2023). Disability: A history of resistance. Yale University Press.
