Disability in the Spaces of Poverty: Critical Theoretical Introductions

Abstract

This chapter maps out disabled people’s own conceptualisations of disability and key elements of the disability experience, providing a theoretical and contextual backdrop for the disability and poverty relationship explored in the following chapters. It highlights how disability experiences are not only complex and multiple but are also embedded in broader notions of personhood. This in turn requires engagement with aspects of the very particular spaces and places in which participants and their families live and articulate their lives, what I term the spaces of poverty, ‘spaces that are as material as they are discursive and ontological’ (Grech, 2014a).