The current year, 2026, marks the 10-year anniversary of KritFunk—the Swedish Network for Critical Disability Studies. First founded in 2016 by a small group of researchers who, at the time, found themselves geographically dispersed, disciplinarily estranged, and theoretically isolated within their local research environments, KritFunk was established to create a platform for exchanging experiences, ideas, and scholarly work influenced by Critical Disability Studies (CDS). A decade after its initial inception, KritFunk has grown as more researchers in Sweden have come to express interest in engaging with this field of study. This development eventually sparked a mutual desire among members to share and showcase the breadth of Swedish CDS research and its multitudinous areas of application across a variety of academic disciplines. In heeding to this call, this special collection examines the meaning and implications of the ‘critical’ in CDS by bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines—including education, ethnology, political science, social work, special education, media and communication studies, and design studies—to engage with contemporary debates in the field. Rooted in the works of members of KritFunk, this collection demonstrates the transformative potential of CDS in reconfiguring how disability is understood, theorized, and studied across disciplines. Importantly, the collection also serves as one of the first instances where Swedish CDS research is brought together and highlighted as belonging to a larger and distinct, albeit heterogeneous, field of inquiry.
CDS emerged in the early 2000s as a response to perceived limitations of established paradigms in traditional disability studies (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009). As Flynn (2024) notes, CDS functions not only as an interdisciplinary scholarly field but also as a theoretically informed perspective aimed at critically interrogating the categories of ability and disability. While the social model of disability had earlier redirected attention from individual impairments to structural and social barriers (Barnes 2020), disability scholars began to argue that its materialist focus overlooked other complex dimensions. Goodley (2014), for example, pushed toward incorporating affect theory and posthumanist thought into CDS. Shildrick (2020) challenged both medical and social models as stable identities and proposed that feminist poststructuralism offers the tools to reconceptualize disability as a site of ontological openness and epistemological uncertainty. This involves questioning not only societal norms but also the very categories that structure our thinking about ability, embodiment, and agency. Thus, rather than simply revising existing models, CDS reorients our understanding of disability conceptually and politically. It resists treating disability as a fixed object of study and instead understands it as a site for critique—interrogating the entwinement of ableism with broader systems like capitalism or colonialism (Goodley et al. 2019). As Schalk (2017) put it, ‘we can understand critical disability studies as a method, an approach, a theoretical framework and perspective—not (exclusively) a study of disabled people.’ In engaging with feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, it not only maps intersections but also seeks to reconfigure the ontological assumptions of what disability—and humanity—entails.
However, some scholars have raised concerns that CDS sometimes positions itself in overly oppositional terms, implying a rupture with earlier traditions grounded in political struggle and activist scholarship. Vehmas and Watson (2014) argue that the field’s increasing focus on poststructuralist critique risks losing touch with the material realities of disadvantage and moral wrongs that disabled people continue to face. Or, in their words, CDS ‘does not examine how things ought to be for disabled people in terms of right and wrong, good and bad’ (Vehmas and Watson 2014, 638). For them, CDS at times downplays the ethical imperative to respond to tangible injustices by overemphasizing the discursive or ontological construction of disability. The distinction that is sometimes made between ‘traditional’ disability research and disability studies—which in itself is far from clear-cut or definitive—is implicitly echoed by some scholars. Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009) critiqued the over-theorization and Western orientation of CDS, calling for engagement with issues often foregrounded in empirical disability research. Grech (2015) similarly emphasizes the need to ground CDS in the lived experiences and structural challenges faced by disabled people in the Global South. These voices stress the importance of retaining a balance between critique and practical engagement, especially for those whose daily lives are most affected by disabling structures.
Recent contributions such as The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Disability Studies (Ellis, Kent and Cousins 2024) highlight the field’s shift toward a more global, pluralistic orientation. For Swedish CDS research, this points to an important avenue for future work: to engage more deeply with critiques of Eurocentrism and to consider how Swedish welfare-state paradigms might unintentionally marginalize alternative ways of knowing and being.
CDS’s critical edge becomes especially salient, we argue, when applied to contexts like Sweden, where disability research has traditionally aligned with policy-driven or welfare-state logics (Söder 2013). While this tradition has embraced inclusionary and participatory frameworks, CDS asks deeper epistemological questions: Whose bodies and knowledges are centered? What normative assumptions underlie policy discourse? Who benefits from these arrangements, and at what cost to others? In doing so, CDS shifts the analytical terrain from access, participation, and representation toward relational ethics and epistemic justice (Goodley, Liddiard and Runswick-Cole 2018; Minich 2016; Naraian 2021). These perspectives are echoed in the articles included in this special collection, each of which engages with CDS in various ways.
Outline of Papers
The special collection includes seven articles that highlight the broad applicability of CDS by examining its intersections with education, patient advocacy, policy, healthcare, art and daily activities, academia, critical disaster studies, and social media. By spanning such diverse societal fields, the collection showcases how CDS can critically reshape knowledge production, inclusive practices, and public discourse around disability.
Linda Stjernholm and Ida Andrea Nilsson use CDS to explore inclusive practices and challenge understandings of disability based on deficit-based frameworks but do so in two different areas. Stjernholm’s article ‘It’s Critical! – How Critical Disability Studies and Critical Disaster Studies Can Amplify Disabled Voices’ explores how disaster risk reduction (DRR) can be informed by CDS and critical disaster studies. This combination, according to Stjernholm, ‘may help to uncover systematic ableism in DRR and point ways in which co-creation can redistribute power and support more inclusive practices’ (Stjernholm 2025, 764). In Nilsson’s contribution, ‘In Search of a DisSchool: Deficit and Inclusion in Danish Schools,’ CDS provides the framework to examine inclusive and deficit-based practices in Danish schools through a critical examination of ‘how schools construct and negotiate the boundaries of inclusion in everyday practice’ (Nilsson 2025, 270). Both articles deal with how disability, not as an afterthought, but as an integral part of everyday practice, can disrupt ableist norms and prompt change, thereby showcasing the usefulness of the theoretical perspectives offered by CDS to these two diverse fields of practice.
Two of the articles in the special collection revolve around healthcare for people with disabilities by focusing on narratives stemming from lived experiences. Kristofer Hansson’s contribution ‘Handling Uncertainty When Seeking Care: How People with Disabilities Encounter and Manage Barriers Within Swedish Healthcare’ is based on interviews on the topic of barriers and uncertainty in the encounter with the Swedish healthcare sector and explores how people with disabilities navigate this uncertainty. Hansson advocates for the necessity of a sociomaterial approach within CDS and uses this to showcase ‘that health inequities are not only socially constructed but also materially and relationally produced’ (Hansson 2025, 548). Stina Melander and Julia Bahner’s article ‘Forced Into an Ableist Narrative? The Swedish Covid Association’s Quest for Recognition’ uses a CDS approach to analyze narratives of the Swedish Covid Association, a patient organization formed by individuals with long COVID to represent and advocate rights to healthcare. However, while such narratives are shown to be powerful ‘in challenging dominant policy discourses,’ the narrative emphasis on productivity and worthiness ‘risks reinforcing ableist tropes and excluding those deemed “non-productive”’ (Melander and Bahner 2025, 310).
The contribution from Amanda Lagerkvist and Anna Foka also focuses on narratives from lived experiences, but concerns self-discovery and, at times, self-diagnosis of ADHD on social media. In ‘Dis/illuminations of ADHD: Self-Discovery and Deferral through Technologies of the Extraordinary Self,’ Lagerkvist and Foka use CDS in combination with existential media studies and historization in their study of ADHD self-discovery on the social media platform TikTok. Through these theoretical combinations, they seek to place people with disabilities at the center of a developing media theory of the self, and to critically explore how technologically mediated self-discovery simultaneously enables recognition while foregrounding the complexity, instability, and ambiguity of subject formation.
The final two articles engage with another set of societal fields, namely academia and artistic work at a day activity center. In the article ‘Crip Flexibility and Painful Analysis: Critical Disability Methodologies of Swedish Welfare State Austerity,’ Christine Bylund draws on methodological considerations in CDS to investigate the ways in which academic ableism and Swedish austerity politics shape academic knowledge production. Focusing on the lived experiences of being a disabled researcher in a Swedish academic and political context, Bylund introduces the concepts of crip flexibility and painful analysis to describe how austerity shapes research undertaken by disabled researchers. In Marie-Louise Stjerna, Helen Knutes Nyqvist, and Stephan Hau’s article ‘Art Work as an Inclusive Space: Caring Relationships at a Day Activity Centre with an Artistic Profile,’ the authors combine a CDS perspective with feminist ethics of care to explore caring relationships in a day activity center with an artistic profile. They argue that in the day activity center, they studied that ‘art work offers an inclusive space where predefined roles of staff and participants somewhat cease to control the interaction between them’ (Stjerna, Nyqvist and Hau 2026, 126) and that the caring relationships are collaborative and reciprocal, which enables voice and agency for the artists.
The contributions in this special collection highlight the broad applicability of CDS as ‘an approach marked by a true transdisciplinarity and an openness to a plethora of resources’ (Shildrick 2020, 39) by examining its intersections with a range of academic disciplines. Spanning diverse societal fields—including education, patient advocacy, policy, healthcare, art and daily activities, academia, critical disaster studies, and social media—the collection showcases how CDS can reshape knowledge production, institutional practices, and public discourse around disability. Taken together, the articles illustrate how CDS is utilized by Swedish researchers in both theoretical and practical contexts, and how it offers analytical frameworks for studying a wide range of topics and research questions. We hope this snapshot of research emerging from the Swedish KritFunk network will inspire and sustain the continued development of CDS research in Sweden and the broader Nordic context.