The 'struggle' for citizenship : citizenship, social movement theory and disability.

In recent years, the concepts of citizenship and social movements, especially the so-called new social movements have become major issues for academics from a wide variety of perspectives. The reason why citizenship has returned to centre stage probably rests, as Kymlicka and Norman (1994) have written, upon the notion that “the health and stability of a modem democracy depends, not only on the justice of its basic structure but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens.” (p.352) Connected with this upsurge of interest in ‘citizenship’ is a growing support for the idea that: “the institutions of constitutional freedom are only worth as much as the population makes of them." (Habermas, 1992: 7) Such thinking may explain the increased interest in social movements since in many respects they can be seen to be the major sites of struggle and negotiation between the individual members of society, albeit working en masse, and the chief ‘institution of constitutional freedom’ in the form of the state. Despite the recent upsurge of interest in citizenship and social movements, the position of disabled people as ‘citizens’ and the structure and functions of the disability movement has been largely over-looked. The absence of disability from these important areas of theorising is all the more interesting in the light of the increasing interest in the notion of embodiment and the impact that this has, for example, upon theories of human rights. The empirical aspect of this research, therefore, seeks to provide a platform for disabled people to voice their opinions on issues relating to citizenship and the disability movement. Within the thesis, ‘disability’ is then used as a case study, contextualised by an interest in the manner in which an understanding of embodiment may impact on citizenship and social movement theorising. The central focus of this research is, therefore, to reconsider citizenship and social movement theorising in the light of disability.