The collected articles within this special edition reflect an exciting
development in the field of disability studies. Dissatisfied with
the primarily bio-medical and apolitical treatment of disability,
a collection of scholars and activists began to think, do research,
and write about disability from a number of different critical perspectives. By
the 1980s and 1990s, scholarly associations, journals, and academic programmes
began to emerge and coalesce around what has now come to be known as
disability studies. Largely centred in the UK, the Nordic countries, and North
America at the time, the discipline has since expanded to a truly global range.
As to be expected of any academic endeavour, different schools and approaches
to disability also began to form within the discipline. At times, these schools of
thought complimented each other, and at other times, they conflicted.
However, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, a younger generation
of scholars and activists, including as well some of the old guard, began to
question the wisdom of researching and theorizing disability within the
confinement of specific schools or models and began to embrace a more diverse
approach while trying to maintain the discipline’s critical and activist edge.
As the discipline developed, this also led to a growing trend that is on
display in this special edition. Scholars in the more traditional academic
disciplines also began to take an interest in disability and incorporated the work
and perspectives of disability studies into their research and writing. This has
led to fruitful multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations that have pushed
disability studies forward in a variety of ways, while also retaining the concerns
that initially animated the discipline. This includes research led by disabled
people and their organisations, research conducted by disabled academics
and/or in collaboration with non-disabled scholars, or research conducted in
the context of a critical response against the longstanding view of disability as
tragedy, deviance, or abnormality, or that of being rendered absent from
history, culture and society. In Iceland, one attempt to create a multi- and
interdisciplinary approach to disability was the “Disability before Disability”
project which operated between the years of 2017 to 2020 and was led by
the first author of this foreword. This project brought together scholars from
Disability Studies, History, Archaeology, Medieval Icelandic literature, Folklore
and Ethnology, Museum Studies and Archival Science at different stages of their
careers, from doctoral students to full professors. This resulted in a number of
workshops, conferences, and papers, culminating in an edited volume
published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis in 2022 entitled Understanding
Disability Throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement
to 1936. The endpoint of the project’s temporal range of 1936 arguably marked
the passage of Icelandic understandings of disability into what could be
considered as the modern bureaucratic and legal codification of disability in the
country.
However, the key goal of “Disability before Disability” was not just a book
but rather the intent, and hope, that this interdisciplinary collaboration would
be sustained beyond the project itself. Within Iceland, we have indeed witnessed
this occur as a number of scholars within the original project have continued to
do disability-related research in their fields and in collaboration with others.
Some of the contributors to this special edition were involved in “Disability
before Disability” and the initial conceptual groundwork for this collaboration
was built during a session at the 16th bi-annual meeting of the Nordic Network
on Disability Research (NNDR) that was held in May of 2023. We were delighted
to learn that Alice and Yoav have continued the momentum of this project on
their own, allowing us to step back and watch the results blossom. We are
honoured to have been asked to write the foreword.
The contributions to this special edition reflect the range in diversity and
focus, as well as the spirit and intent, of the “Disability before Disability”
project. While that specific project was historical in nature, we hoped that
subsequent work would extend its critical disability studies approach into a
variety of fields, focal points, concerns, and methodological frameworks. In this
special edition, there is, of course, a focus on medieval Icelandic texts, but not
exclusively. Those contributions that do so incorporate a range of approaches
to different impairments and how they were written about, interpreted and
understood. Disability studies should not be restricted to one theoretical
approach, school of thought or form of data. The inclusion of different
disciplines and perspectives into research in the disability field illustrated how,
for example, the debate that raged in the English-speaking world over
terminology such as “disabled people” versus “people with disabilities” was, in
actuality, a very situated debate once cross-cultural discussions about the
disability concept became part of the conversation. The contributions in this
special edition carry this understanding forward in a temporal context and
express cautions about extrapolating the disability concept of the present
backwards through time. It is refreshing to see this understanding form an
integral part of the appreciation for the cultural and historical complexity of
disability among the younger generation of scholars in an almost “common
sense” way that was sorely lacking in some forms of early disability research.
Finally, readers may initially wonder about the inclusion of a contemporary
focus in a special edition whose primary focus is an analysis of sagas and poetry.
However, many of those with a disability studies background or focus would not
find this out of place. Disability is an integral part of the human condition.
Despite differences in experiences and implications as the result of time,
culture, language, impairment and a host of intersectional factors, impairments
as the result of factors before or at birth, illnesses, accidents, violence or aging
are common to humanity at large. This concerns not just the data that
researchers collect and analyse under the umbrella of disability, but
experiences of those who must navigate academia itself. This inclusion drives
home the point that disability is a phenomenon that must be understood in all
of its complexity.