This edition of Discourse comes into being after two decades of engagement with the cultural politics of the body – through the arts, teaching, research and varied encounters with ‘disability’ ranging from the very personal to the professional. From the critique of ‘the medical model’ of disability undertaken during the early and mid-1990s, a ‘social model’ emerged, particularly in the caring professions and those trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and schooling, it was a period of cementing inclusive practices and the ‘integration’ and inclusion of disability into ‘mainstream’ (Northway, Citation2002; Vincent, Evans, Lunt, & Young, Citation1996; Vislie, Citation2003). What was lacking in the debates around the social model, however, were the challenges to abledness that were being grappled with in the routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers and caseworkers. Outside the academy, new forms of activity and new questions were circulating. Challenges to abledness flourished in the arts and constituted the lived experience of many disability activists. In the early 1990s, for instance, performing arts companies such as the London-based CanDoCo and Restless Dance TheatreFootnote1 in Adelaide, Australia, were making dance and redefining its boundaries as physically based performance sourced in bodily capacity (in preference to disciplining the body into extant genres of ‘the dancing body’).