Disabled people live in our society in a notorious state of social exclusion. In spite of continuous legislative proposals and the design of new social policies, developed with the alleged purpose of social inclusion of this particularly vulnerable group, the social reality proves to be a tenacious perpetuation of this excluding framework. According to the 2001 census, there are 636,059 disabled people in Portugal, which amounts to 6.1% of the overall population.

This project, which intends to contribute to a cultural and socio-political questioning of the field of disability – a still embryonic field in the academic sphere in Portugal –, will attempt to link up with the subject that in other countries is the focus of Disability Studies. This field of study aims at questioning mainly the confrontation between the culturally dominant fatalist conception of disability, that emphasises individual functional incapacities and normalises exclusion, and a social critique that denounces the social exclusion of disabled people as a product of the structural conditions of social oppression.

Our work proposal aims specifically at an investigation of the life course of people whose lives are changed by a spinal cord injury and, simultaneously, of the institutional and social responses to these people.

In this study, the core of the empirical work will focus on spinal cord injury and its effect on the life of the injured person. Despite being a relatively circumscribed medical and biographical reality, we will also attempt to draw a parallel with the situation of disabled people in Portugal.