Differences, conflations and foundations: the limits to 'accurate' theoretical representation of disabled people's experience?

This article proposes that current approaches to theorising disability as a form of social oppression and their relationship to disabled people's experiences are hampered by a modernist conceptual framework, which is increasingly at odds with the contemporary social world and with developments in theory-making as a whole. In order to bring disability theory closer to the lives of disabled people and the politics of new social movements, it is argued that the conceptual underpinnings of theory must be broadened beyond their current focus on structures, which view differences in terms of delimiting boundaries to one which includes an awareness of the relational, mediatory and performative role of discourse, and the increasing importance of local knowledges in shaping the social and political world.