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Disability

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion
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Disability refers to a debilitating condition and the lived experience of physical and mental incapability, infirmity, handicap, or impairments. Professional, academic, political, and sociocultural philosophies shape varying and often-conflicting meanings of disability. The denotation of disability therefore varies from culture to culture, but the meaning of the concept is not limited to notions of optimum physical and mental functionality. Social, religious, and moral considerations of physical or mental attributes, for instance, may result in people being considered disabled in certain contexts despite being able to function without particular difficulty in their daily lives (Bruce 2010, p. 255). Proliferation of social, functional, medical, embodiment, cultural, relational, and the human rights models of disability and associated interventions characterize the array of competing definitions of the concept (Goodley 2011; Gupta 2011). While disability may entail objective definition...

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Correspondence to Benson A. Mulemi .

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Mulemi, B.A. (2016). Disability. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_9273-1

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