Ability

This chapter on ability engages geographic work on disabilism and an ableism perspective. This pairing allows the illumination of taken‐for‐granted norms of ability that flow through social spaces such as schools and workplaces, as well as the ways that disabled people have both fought for access to mainstream spaces and worked to create disability‐specific sites of inclusion and community. The chapter looks at how efforts to conceptualize the relational vulnerability of all humans offer a way to challenge prevailing norms of individual ability and independence and concludes with some thoughts about enduring challenges confronting disabled people, manifest most recently in the COVID‐19 pandemic. Echoing calls in other chapters for an intersectional approach, the authors also call for productive tension between disabilism and ableism in social and cultural geographic scholarship.