Disability

Disability is a highly contested construct that has been under defined and conceptualised within tourism scholarship. This entry will provide a human rights definition of disability before outlining the major conceptualisations of disability as a policy and research construct. These conceptualisations include the medical or individual model of disability, the social model of disability, critical disability studies and ableism. The entry concludes with a challenge to tourism academics to include disability and accessibility within the curriculum and for researchers to be more conscious in their conceptualisation of disability to understand the implications for scholarship from the inception of the research idea, through all aspects of fieldwork, analysis and contribution to the development of both tourism and disability studies scholarship. What the entry does not do is examine the history of disability in tourism scholarship as that is covered in the entry on “accessible tourism”.