The Social Production of Disability in Encounters with Ontario’s Right to Read Inquiry: Beyond the Models of Disability

Abstract

This paper explores responses to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read Inquiry (2022) so as to reveal the importance of examining the social production of disability. In 2024, Christine Caughill, a student doing a Doctorate in Education, published a critique of the Inquiry Report and 157 recommendations raising concerns about its reliance on medicalized understandings of dyslexia and its implications for education in Ontario. Shortly after, Natalie Riediger, an Associate Professor of Nutritional Science, published a critical rejoinder to Caughill’s paper. Riediger defended the Inquiry, framing it as an example of the social model of disability in action and cautioned against critique. Our paper explores the meaning made of disability in the Inquiry and Report as well as Riediger’s rejoinder revealing their restricted versions of disability and reading. Our interpretive disability studies approach moves beyond the binary of the medical and social models, and demonstrates that any model used to contain or dismiss questioning also blocks engagement with the phenomena it explains. We build on the contributions of these models offer while addressing their limitations, in order to consider the sociocultural, historical, and political aspects of disability that allow meaning to be made beyond the confined rules or categories that models prescribe. Without a disability studies perspective that critically questions normative understandings of disability prescribed within scholarly models and governmental inquiries, and reports, people, including children labelled disabled, are left with limited conceptions of themselves and disability, as well as few ways to combat the powerful narratives that surround and order their lives.