Safeguarding Critical-Emancipatory Scholarship: Institutional Vulnerability and the Future of Disability Studies in Germany

Recent budgetary and structural decisions in Germany threaten core institutional sites of Disability Studies (DS), notably the Center for Disability Studies and Participation Research (ZeDiSplus) in Hamburg and the International Research Center for Disability Studies (iDiS) in Cologne. Drawing on three documentary corpora  the national appeal “Disability Studies under Threat” issued by scholarly and civil-society actors, a formal position of the Hamburg Deaf Association, and a guest commentary by Homann and Saerberg  this article conducts a neutral, analytical assessment of how DS, understood as a critical-emancipatory and transdisciplinary field, becomes institutionally vulnerable within contemporary higher-education governance. We situate the German case in international DS scholarship, including the social model of disability and debates on the political economy of knowledge production. Methodologically, we use qualitative documentary analysis with a priori and inductive coding to (a) map the claims and evidence advanced by stakeholders; (b) identify mechanisms of marginalization (delegitimation, isolation, and budgetary compression); and (c) examine implications for social work as a profession committed to equity and inclusion. Results indicate a consistent pattern across sources: DS infrastructures are structurally under-embedded, exposed to short-term fiscal logics, and at risk of being re-absorbed into traditional domains (e.g., special education) that may dilute core DS principles of “nothing about us without us.” We also find that DS functions as an enabling knowledge base for implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in higher education and social services. We discuss how these findings align with and extend international research on DS, co-production, intersectionality, and academic precarity. The article contributes an analytic model  the DS Institutional Vulnerability Framework (DS-IVF)  and a set of measurable indicators for safeguarding DS in universities. We conclude with a precise research question, an evidence-based answer, and a statement of the new contribution for scholarship and practice.


Keywords: Disability Studies; critical-emancipatory science; institutional vulnerability; higher-education governance; inclusion; co-production; UN-CRPD; social work; Germany; policy analysis