Afterword: From Disability Studies to Studies in Ableism

Abstract

Today ambivalent survivors are charged with passing on knowledge and memories of how life was so that ‘we’ can dream of another way to be. Thus stories of disability and abledness are like maps providing safety so the traveller will not inadvertently turn off the road, go astray or navigate haphazardly into areas unknown or secured for the sole use of other, inhabitants. Like the map, stories provide clarity about the journey taken and the road ahead. The banter helps us make sense of the world and the way in which we interpret the ‘nature’ of things and interpolate ways of difference. Sometimes these stories are explicitly named and actively exchanged. Others are more mundane, somewhat insidious; passing on in a multitude of remnants, connected, disconnected, contrary and multiple, eventually taking on the status of a naturalised state of affairs. Even though the terrain may be winding and rocky, there is at least an illusion of certainty in the map which can be re-read and consulted again and again to ensure ordered spaces, corrected tracking, helping us re-cognise the signposts as we travel.

… we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses … We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.

(Levi, 1989, pp. 63–64)