Disability Studies in Crisis: Unpopular Antithesis

Apparently the left is not giving up in the fight for the future of disability studies in Hamburg. “20 years of pioneering work in disability studies in Hamburg must not simply disappear from the scene,” said Heike Sudmann, co-chair of the Left, at the alternative expert hearing. The Left organized this last week after the SPD, Greens and AfD rejected a hearing in the science committee.

The self-image of disability studies differs fundamentally from other research on disability. “Nothing about us without us”, the motto of the self-determination movement for people with disabilities, also applies to them. Jürgen Homann, research associate at the Center for Disability Studies and Participation Research (Zedis), describes that there “people who are usually researched, made decisions and professionally disposed of” themselves researched and taught “as equal, equal scientific subjects”. In 2013, six of the seven employees had a disability.

Disability Studies in Hamburg has so far led the life of a challenge cup: from 2005 to 2014 it was based at the university, then at the Evangelische Hochschule am Rauhen Haus as a center for disability studies and participation research (Zedis). But in 2025 the funding for Zedis as an independent research institute ended.

No problem, the Senate said at the time, disability studies will be docked at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW). But if you ask the HAW, there is no mention of this. “There are no current plans for positions or courses at HAW Hamburg,” writes the press spokesman. The science authority has not yet responded to the taz request.

The city could be proud of having established a flagship project with Disability Studies. In contrast to the Anglo-American region, this research area is hardly represented in Germany: apart from Hamburg, there are only institutes in Bochum and Cologne, although further funding in Cologne is unclear.

For Heike Sudmann from the Left, this lack of interest is negligent: "Many people think: Disability doesn't apply to me. But only three percent have a congenital disability; everyone else acquires it through accident, illness or old age. We have to deal with how society creates disability itself and how we deal with it."

The desire for independence and the defense against suspected appropriation repeatedly led to friction between researchers in disability studies and the institutions under whose umbrella they conducted their research. When the project at the University of Hamburg ended in 2013, the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote that there had been conflicts between Zedis employees and colleagues from the field of education for the disabled. According to an internal paper, scientific productivity is “modest”, and Zedis also represents a “view of science that is viewed as problematic by colleagues, especially from the field of education for the disabled”.

For Jürgen Homann from Zedis, there is a fundamental misunderstanding behind this criticism. He writes: “Disability studies was perceived above all as a politically motivated, incompatible antithesis to disability education.” Their “critical perspective and the importance of situated experiential knowledge” were “understood more as a scientific deficit than as an independent approach to knowledge.”

No wonder, one might think, that an approach that fundamentally questions both university and social structures causes friction. “Disability studies examine disability not just as an individual problem, but also as a social order, as a relationship between power, science and institutional practices,” writes Jürgen Homann.

In an evaluation by the Bochum Center for Disability Studies that Zedis itself requested in 2017, the feedback was twofold. On the one hand, it was said that the “scientific output can only be assessed as ‘sufficient’ under the given conditions”. The lectures and publications by the employees can be seen as “important contributions to the further development of German disability studies” and thus also “inclusion and participation research”.

In fact, students and scientists have repeatedly shown solidarity with Zedis. Given the “return of a eugenic language and politics based on contempt for weakness and supposed inability,” disability studies are indispensable, said historian Nina Mackert from the University of Hamburg at the alternative expert hearing. Their research questions what appears to be nature and instead makes transparent “how societies decide which differences count and what follows from them”. That's why Mackert called for a place for precisely this form of science: institutionalized and not dependent on individual project funds.

Public interest in the alternative expert hearing was great; However, no one from the democratic parties, which were also invited, came. For the leftist Heike Sudmann, the lack of interest in a future for disability studies is consistent with the running of other academic institutions in Hamburg: the specialist library for women and gender studies and the Colonialism Research Center. “These are small areas where there was perhaps hope that there would no longer be any resistance.”