‘Disability’: chapter published in ‘The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology’

Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer and Jonathan Paul Mitchell

Feature image courtesy of Routledge

A chapter by Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer and Jonathan Paul Mitchell, ‘Disability’, has been published in the collection ‘The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology’ edited by Steffen Herrmann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner and Nils Baratella (2024).

This chapter discusses how ideas from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology can elucidate the lived body as a political entity and sketches a political phenomenology of disability. The chapter considers how Edmund Husserl’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a productive framework for attending to the lived body. It then moves to critiques of classical phenomenology and mainstream phenomenological accounts of illness concerning assumptions about normal embodiment and the breakdowns caused by disability and illness. Finally, it explores critical and crip phenomenological approaches, which are where we see the political potential of phenomenology of disability.