Disability, Discrimination and Linguistic Justice: A Human Variation Perspective

Project Information

HUMVAR

Grant agreement ID: 101107614

DOI

10.3030/101107614

Project closed

EC signature date 19 April 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 214 934,40

Coordinated by

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HUMVAR (Disability, Discrimination and Linguistic Justice: A Human Variation Perspective)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action is titled “Disability, Discrimination and Linguistic Justice: A Human Variation Perspective,” and it aims to advance knowledge on a particular disability model, the human variation model (HVM). The HVM claims that differences in individual characteristics are a matter of degree. Once a given personal trait becomes atypical, it tends to be excluded from social arrangements. That is because arrangements are most frequently tailored to the average member of society. The HVM holds that disability is neither a personal health limitation nor a disadvantage stemming from the able-bodied majority’s prejudice. Instead, the emphasis is on the interaction between individual characteristics and the environment. Thus, the model places neither individuals nor discriminatory environments at the crux of the matter, but the mismatch between individual traits and the environment’s current accommodating capacity.
Despite the HVM having earned the status of a fundamental tool for understanding the process of disability, insufficient attention has been given to advancing it in needed ways since its original proponents, Richard Scotch and Kay Schriner, put it forward more than twenty-five years ago. As a result, the Action had the following objectives. First, to provide a philosophical defense of the HVM, emphasizing its strengths relative to other disability models. In addition, the first objective redefines the type of disability disadvantage that the model articulates as a special case of discrimination (discrimination-as-human-variation). The discrimination-based account of the HVM is revisionary—to wit, the original version of the model aims to be an alternative to discrimination-based approaches to disability. A significant type of disability disadvantage that the Action focuses on is inaccessible physical infrastructure, such as inaccessible buildings and rigid workplace arrangements.
The second objective shows that the HVM delineates a plausible causal story that grounds societal responsibility towards the disabled in creating more accessible physical and social environments. This analysis provides a new contribution to the debate on how causal analyses of disability models can buttress normative responses to disability disadvantage. The third objective defends the analogy between religious and disability accommodation by responding to critics who oppose it. The action shows that one important reason why some authors deny that there might be similar reasons to accommodate both religious believers and disabled people is that they believe disability is a tragic and negative feature of the life of disabled people that they want to get rid of. The action points out that this is a false picture, and disability is often the problem of having atypical characteristics in a society tailored to typical people. In other words, if we understand disability through the HVM, we will see that some religious accommodations can be explained and justified by the HVM.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work was conducted in 7 work packages (WPs). WP1 was devoted to project administration, including continuous project management, organizing conferences (most notably the panel “Disability and Justice” at the MANCEPT 2024 Conference), teaching and training activities, and other project-related events. WP2 was the work package dedicated to research. The goal of WP 2 was to produce three papers suitable for submission to prestigious philosophy journals. WP2 far exceeded its expectations as it produced five papers altogether, among which one (“Religion as Disability,” related to the Action’s third objective) has already been accepted by the most prestigious academic book publisher, Oxford University Press, another (“Structural Discrimination Through Ignorance”) has a very good chance of being accepted by a top ten general philosophy journal, a third one (“The Human Variation Model: A Defense” related to the Action’s first objective) is currently under review by a highly prestigious disability studies journal. The fourth paper (“Social Responsibility for Causing Disability Disadvantage,” related to the second objective) will be submitted soon to a leading political philosophy journal, while the paper "Disability Disadvantage and Discrimination: A Human Variation Perspective" will be submitted shortly to a top general philosophy journal. Lastly, during the Fellowship, two papers were produced that are not part of the Action but have significantly contributed to its success and impact. The first is a review essay on Jessica Begon’s book, Disability Through the Lens of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), which the critically acclaimed political philosophy journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice has already published online. The second paper, which delves into the question of disability and sport, will be a chapter in an Oxford Handbook that will be published in 2026.
WP3 was devoted to teaching in the third semester of the Fellowship period and consisted of teaching the PhD summer course “Disability, Discrimination, and Justice” in August 2025. WP4 and WP5 comprised the dissemination and communication activities of the Action. During the Fellowship, the works-in-progress of the Action were presented at ten conferences from Vienna to Montreal, and the Action’s results will be communicated continuously. WP6 comprised training activities, which included participation in specific workshops and seminars. WP7 consisted of the secondment of the project that took place at KU Leuven in Belgium between March 2025 and May 2025, significantly contributing to the Action’s impact. Altogether, the WPs of the Action will foreseeably lead to five prestigious publications related to the Action, plus two unrelated to it, and their communication, which will significantly contribute to establishing the Fellow's position as an expert in the philosophy of disability and discrimination. In contrast, training activities enhanced the Fellow's employability outside academia.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action advanced the understanding of disability-related disadvantage and discrimination in significant ways. The Action provided a defense of an essential disability model, the human variation model. It illuminated the processes that lead to inaccessible and thus discriminatory environments for people living with disabilities. Further, the Action showed society's causal responsibility in creating disability disadvantage and clarified and specified the liability of certain social actors. It also showed the epistemic dimension of how these disadvantages are generated. In addition, it also revealed that discrimination-as-human-variation not only affects disabled people, but also other social groups, such as religious and cultural communities, and women. These are all significant contributions to the field.