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Dear All, It would be nice to put this one to bed. However, I would tend to agree with Johnson, who is at the one time eager to guide a person/student who is keen to succeed in their studies, and at the same time wary of providing easy advice to someone who will gain a significant qualification as a result of successful completion of this unit, and others. I will submit my own misgivings about the subject, but acknowledge John's argument that the email originally sent does not necessarily reflect the request of someone who does not have a significant grounding in disability studies already. My observation here in Australia is that there is very little available in the tertiary education system at a diploma or undergraduate level that has anything to do with disability as a rights issue, and that acknowledges the existence of a significant body of work undertaken by people with disabilities themselves, and requires students to understand and critique this work. Rather, entry point into studies is the delivery and management of disability services, and only when we get to postgraduate level do we see some semblance of a critical approach - and it is only then when social model texts and authors begin to get a mention. The result is that most undergraduate study reflect welfare and managerialist paradigms. This, in my opinion, is not the best preparation for then being introduced to social model and "post-social model" perspectives in postgraduate study. My own reading of the original email was that the person requesting did not have a significant grounding in ideas and concepts beyond an essentialist understanding of disability as impairment. But (quite genuinely) this I concede may be the result of the brevity of the message itself - hence my delay in responding, and assuming that the person may be one of those many students who, in Australia, have taken an undergraduate course that looks at disability from a welfare or medical perspective, and then is confronted with the idea of rights, identity and disability as a social and political movement. All the best, Michael Bleasdale ________________End of message______________________ Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List are now located at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.