The Social Model: Why the Environment is Broken, Not You [May 8th Episode]

Harper Bennett

Welcome to the show, everybody! I'm Harper Bennett, here with David Carlisle, Claudia Reese, and Eric Marquette. And Eric Marquette, I want you to picture a standard clinical evaluation room in the year 2004. You're fifteen years old, you've recently acquired a spinal cord injury, and a doctor holding a clipboard looks at you and says, "Our goal is to FIX this so you can walk again."

Eric Marquette

Wait, "fix this"? Like you're a broken transmission in a car?

Harper Bennett

Exactly. Like I was a project. And that phrase -- "fix this" -- is the entire premise of the medical model of disability condensed into two words. The medical model says the problem is located ENTIRELY inside the individual's body. If you can't climb the stairs, the medical model says YOUR legs are the problem.

Claudia Reese

Which is completely exhausting. As an urban planner, I look at that exact same scenario -- a person who can't get up the stairs -- and the social model of disability says, "No, the stairs are the problem. The building is BROKEN, not the person."

David Carlisle

The building is broken! Yes! When my two kids were first diagnosed, I spent years in school IEP meetings where educators kept talking about "closing the gap." How do we make them act MORE like neurotypical kids? And I always stumble on that word -- neuro -- neurodiversity. See? Every time. But the shift for me was realizing we were trying to cure a fish of its inability to climb a tree, instead of just... finding it a river.

Harper Bennett

And that shift is monumental. In 1976, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation -- UPIAS -- published a manifesto in the UK. They officially made this distinction. They said impairment is the physical reality, but disability is the RESTRICTION caused by a society that doesn't account for us.

Eric Marquette

Hold on -- 1976? That's fourteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act even existed. So they were redefining the whole concept while it was still completely legal to just... NOT build ramps?

Claudia Reese

Exactly. And as someone who oversees multi-million dollar infrastructure projects, I can tell you that the legacy of that era is LITERALLY poured into our concrete. We're still retrofitting cities because the architects of the 20th century assumed everyone using a building had two working legs and perfect vision.

Eric Marquette

So if you spend your whole life being told by the medical model that *you* are the thing that needs to be fixed... how do you unlearn that? Because that kind of internalized SHAME doesn't just vanish when you install a curb cut.

Harper Bennett

It doesn't. And it takes years. For a long time, I wouldn't speak up in able-bodied spaces. I was so worried about being a BURDEN. The flip only happened for me when I started adaptive rock climbing. I have this whole collection of miniature carabiners on my keychain now -- one for every new climb.

Claudia Reese

Wait, you keep carabiners on your keychain? How HEAVY is this thing?

Harper Bennett

It weighs like two pounds! It ruins my ignition. But every single one of those carabiners represents a moment where I stopped apologizing for my body and started DEMANDING the right gear to let my body do what it wanted. It was a physical claiming of space.

David Carlisle

I love that. Demanding the RIGHT gear. It reminds me of the obsession I developed over the pandemic with baking complex sourdough bread. Which sounds like a tangent, but bear with me!

Eric Marquette

I am tracking the carabiners, David Carlisle. You're going to have to do some HEAVY lifting to connect sourdough to the social model of disability.

David Carlisle

I promise it connects! Look, a sourdough starter is a living thing. And for the first five days, it LITERALLY looks like a jar of dead, gray sludge. You think you've failed. You want to throw it out. But you just have to maintain the environment -- keep the temperature right, feed it -- and on day six or seven, it starts bubbling. Unlearning internalized ableism is exactly like that. You can't FORCE self-acceptance on day two. You just have to change the environment and have patience with the messy, slow process of growth.

Claudia Reese

Okay, the sourdough analogy actually lands. Because when my kids were diagnosed, I had massive IMPOSTER syndrome as an advocate. I thought I had to have all the answers immediately. But you don't. You just have to keep showing up to those contentious city council meetings and demanding that the environment CHANGES.

Eric Marquette

Let's talk about the cultural side of this. Because when you stop trying to fix yourself to fit into an able-bodied world, you suddenly have room to find your own people.

Harper Bennett

Oh, disability culture is the BEST KEPT SECRET in the world. Have you guys heard the term "crip time"?

David Carlisle

I have, but explain it for the listeners.

Harper Bennett

Alison Kafer writes about this brilliantly in her 2013 book *Feminist, Queer, Crip*. Crip time isn't just "disabled people are always late because it takes longer to get ready." It's a fundamental REIMAGINING of our relationship with time. It's an agreement in the community that bodies and minds have their own pace, and we don't have to PUNISH each other for not keeping up with the relentless clock of capitalism.

Eric Marquette

2013. So this is a relatively modern academic framework, but it describes something the community has been living forever. The idea that time itself is an accessibility issue is blowing my mind a little bit.

Claudia Reese

Right! And that shared language creates immense political power. In 1998, James Charlton published a book that popularized a phrase that became the absolute BEDROCK of the disability rights movement: "Nothing About Us Without Us." It actually originated with South African disability activists in the early 90s.

David Carlisle

"Nothing About Us Without Us." Which means NO MORE able-bodied doctors, or politicians, or even well-meaning parents like me, sitting in a room making policy decisions without disabled people at the HEAD of the table.

Harper Bennett

Exactly. Because accessibility isn't a FAVOR you're doing for us. It's a fundamental human right. And when we shift from the medical model to the social model, we stop asking for a cure, and we start DEMANDING our place in the world. So I'll leave everyone with this question: look around your office, your school, or your city block. Who is MISSING from that space? And what barrier is keeping them out?