The right-wing authoritarian changes in society are also evident in the abolition of academic centers for Disability Studies: At the turn of the year, funding for the Center for Disability Studies (ZeDis) in Hamburg was terminated; the only German university chair for Disability Studies at the University of Cologne as well as the funding for bidok, a digital, barrier-free library on disability and inclusion based at the University of Innsbruck, were also discontinued on December 31, 2025, due to massive cost-cutting measures. This deprived DS in German-speaking countries of key centers for research into central social issues, albeit the Disability Studies professorship at Alice Salomon University and the representation of DS in various other university departments continue to exist.
The resistance of the German- and English-speaking Disability Studies community to the announced closure of the internationally renowned center was comparatively strong. There were numerous statements and press releases, and the director of the Centre of Disability Studies at the University of Leeds (UK), Prof. Dr. Miro Griffith (UK), protested to the Hamburg Senate and the University of Cologne against the closures of both locations.
The current situation of DS‘s lack of funding and institutional affiliation clearly contradicts the state’s obligations to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Art. 24 in conjunction with Art. 4). This seems to have little significance for government action. Moreover, the lack of support from cooperating university and academic institutions outside the DS community (with the exception of the Landes-Asten-Konferenz Hamburg and the AWO-Fachstelle für Migration und Behinderung) also points to a problem within the sciences and research. Deficit-oriented perspectives on disability still dominate there: disability is still understood as an individual flaw that must either be cured or contained and brought under control.
The continued prevalence of a deficit-oriented approach, which is particularly evident in the preservation or even expansion of special education degree programs, is closely linked to the rejection of socially critical perspectives. Learning to critically understand disability as part of society is a task undertaken in interdisciplinary fields of research such as disability studies, gender studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. These also call for the practical implementation of social equality. Insofar as they have been able to establish themselves institutionally at all, socially critical perspectives are currently losing more and more political support and are increasingly threatened in their institutional existence. The right-wing extremist discourse that excludes minorities is also prevailing in the deliberate termination of funding for emancipatory research positions.
As the Disability Studies Working Group (AGDS) points out, disabled scientists, activists, and artists are conducting their own research. The AGDS is an association of disabled scientists, activists, and artists from Germany who do not see disability as a problem requiring treatment, but rather examine it as a category of social difference. With the Zeitschrift für Disability Studies (ZDS – Journal for Disability Studies) and other publications such as the conference proceedings “Disability Studies in German-speaking Countries: Between Emancipation and Appropriation” (2018), disability studies had established itself alongside gender, queer, and post-/decolonial studies in German-speaking countries.
The interdisciplinary theoretical perspective of DS was elaborated in 2014 in a short and concise article entitled “Was sind eigentlich Disability Studies? Wechselspiel von Beeinträchtigung und Barrieren” (What are Disability Studies? The interplay of impairment and barriers) in the journal Forschung & Lehre. Alles was die Wissenschaft bewegt, 21(7), which took a clear stance against the widespread traditional, individualistic, deficit-oriented view. The article was republished in 2017 on bidok for open access and made available to a wider public. Essentially, it is about analyzing the social processes of attribution and exclusion that cause people with impairments to become disabled. The key here is the understanding of disability as a deviation from social expectations of normality and thus as a social construct. These interdisciplinary studies, which emerged from political disability movements, aim to examine not only the construction of disability, but also the constructions of normality and non-disability that shape social exclusion processes.
Disability studies criticize the dominant, deficit-oriented, and essentializing discourse on disability in the social, human, and medical sciences, and emphasize a shift in the focus of research: research is conducted not about, but with and from the perspective of people with disabilities, in line with the demand of the emancipatory disability movement, “Nothing about us without us.” The historical perspective is also central to DS, for example, the analysis of the historical development of categorizations and their close connection with exclusion and the (forced) institutionalization of disabled people in homes. DS respond to essentializing categories and exclusion by providing basic scientific knowledge about life and learning opportunities with chronic illnesses and disabilities.
While disability and non-disability are traditionally constructed as clearly separable phenomena, Disability Studies argues that every person can acquire an impairment in the course of their life and that people are only temporarily non-disabled, using the term “temporarily able-bodied.” With increasing age, the likelihood of acquiring various impairments, encountering related barriers, and becoming disabled increases. It follows that the issue of disability and the examination of the discriminatory strategy of ableism can affect all people sooner or later, and that Disability Studies as a field of science is therefore relevant not only to one group, but to everyone.
It is crucial to challenge the power of the category of non-disability, constructed as normality. This requires more than just critical discourse; it also requires negotiation processes with the dominant actors in the field—such as special education practitioners, special institutions, and other representatives of traditional notions of disability. The obligation to guarantee human rights is of central importance here. All states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and thus incorporated it into their own national law are obliged to implement the full, effective, and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society—Germany since March 26, 2009. These achievements must be defended and fought for again and again: against the backdrop of neoliberal and increasingly right-wing extremist and also (neo)conservative social discourses, as well as economic “constraints” against the rise of ableist and eugenic social discourses.
Thus, after the spirit of optimism of the 2010s, we are now in a state of resistance and defense against the state and political-social forces that want to reduce and ultimately prevent critical research on non-disability and its academic anchoring in the form of emancipatory disability studies.
Editor’s note:
Here is the link to a letter of protest to the Minister of Science of North Rhine-Westphalia and the University of Cologne, co-initiated by KriSol, regarding the planned elimination of the professorship for Disability Studies and the International Research Center for Disability Studies in Cologne.