Disability studies in academic production: a cartography of the global North arena

Abstract

What would be the place of disability studies in contemporary scientific practice? To what extent might the circulation of investigations that question ableist ontologies and position disability as a relevant social marker for understanding the different forms of erasure and social oppression be stirring new research agendas? Based on a mapping of 2,864 documents registered in the Scopus and Web of Science databases between the years 1956 and 2020, this article seeks to describe the general trends in production and the intellectual structure of disability studies over the past seven decades. The purpose is to offer an updated map of the leading publication outlets, authors, theoretical repertoires, heuristic approaches and political subjects that compete for visibility in the international scenario of knowledge production regarding disability. This investigation suggests that disability is an analytical and political category that participates in the co-production of different models of interpretation and construction of the lives of people with disabilities.

Keywords
disability studies; social model; scientific production; sociology of knowledge; bibliometrics