Disablism in housing and comparative community care discourse - Towards an interventionist model of disability and interventionist welfare regime theory

This paper is presented in two parts. In this part I provide a critique of the socio-biological essentialism that infuses the community care discourses in "housing studies" and "comparative studies". I argue that this biological essentialism has encouraged researchers to accept the common sense assumption that the "special needs" of disabled people are per se located within the incompetent body/mind. The effect of this has resulted in the construction of a reductionist academic discourse. This propagates the notion that recent policy initiatives taken in Britain and other European countries (which now encourage the regulation of "special needs" in the home, rather than in the so-called "institution") represent some form of cognate "total change" or "paradigm shift". In addition, the paper also challenges "radical sociologies" of disability that, in per se locating disability outwith the body/mind, lie at the other extreme. To this end, discourses within this mode of thought contend that these policy shifts have not engendered any form of social change, and thus represent little more than "total statis". To do this, I develop an interventionist model of disability (and from this, interventionist welfare regime theory). This enables me to demonstrate not only the complexity of the situation (which is infused with elements of both change and statis), but also the extent to which problems of the body/mind are particular to different cultures, thus necessitating disjunctive policy responses.