Disability has long been perceived as a personal medical issue – having a physical, sensory, or cognitive impairment. But it is also a social reality, often synonymous with poverty, lack of accessibility, powerlessness, and inferior social status (not being ‘recognized as a person’). For several decades now, social movements and public policies in their wake have been challenging the inequalities tied to the social treatment of disability, particularly through the use of rights framing.

What does the recognition of rights in public policy change for the social experience of disability? Are rights just ‘blather’, out of step with what happens ‘in practice’, or do they have real effects in people’s lives? Or, to move past this alternative, are some of their effects not linked precisely to the opportunity they give Chloé Lamarche to denounce them as ‘a lot of blather’? This book examines the consequences of disability policy in terms of the realization of the rights of people with visual or mobility impairments in France.

Such an inquiry requires us first to identify the various ways in which rights are mobilized in public policy, from speeches and legislation to policies intended to make rights effective. But we must also clarify how the rights angle can provide a productive framework for understanding the consequences of policy on the transformation of disability-related inequalities. In other words, how do rights have the potential to bring about social change?

The role of public policy in realizing – or not realizing – this potential is captured in this book through the experiences of disabled people. Their stories, collected through biographical interviews, are analysed from a perspective that combines the contributions of the sociology of public policy (a reception-focused approach) and the sociology of law (the study of rights realization at the individual level).

Disability policy, rights, and social change

The experience of disability simultaneously implies the experience of certain physical, sensory, cognitive, or psychological characteristics that lead to long-term impairments, and the experience of the social treatment associated with them. Public policy affects both dimensions: while health policies impact the medical aspects, many other policies influence the social aspects of the experience of disability, which reflect the position afforded to disabled people in society.