CERIC Seminar with Clare Williams: "Ability Capitalism: Disabling legalities of market relations"

Clare is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham, her research encompasses law, economy, society and disability.

Abstract

This talk outlines my theory of ability capitalism; that is, law's constitutive role in market constructions of disability. I start with Marta Russell's work which demonstrates how disability can function as a market technology of power. What is missing from this narrative though is the constitutive role of law in market relations. Lawyers typically take markets to be naturally occurring, spontaneously arising and self-regulating phenomena, neglecting the fact that markets are specifically legal institutions. Political economists, whilst challenging the 'natural market' narrative, have similarly tended to neglect the constitutive role of law in constructing markets. Accordingly, ability capitalism teases out the processes by which law sets the foundations for disability-exclusionary markets that anticipate 'standard' actors, disabling those who cannot align themselves with this standard. I will outline the four processes identified, including (i) legal predistribution and (ii) legal coding that both (iii) reveal 'standard' assumptions whilst concealing the non-standard, also rendering invisible (iv) law's demurity to underlying efficiency calculations and economic analyses.

While developed in the context of UK labour markets in the light of my own experiences of market inclusion as a disabled researcher during the pandemic lockdowns and shifts to remote working, I am extending ability capitalism to housing and debt markets, where empirical evidence tells us that disabled people continue to face exclusions and oppressions. One potential challenge to these seemingly intractable oppressions that ability capitalism does suggest is, in contrast to most accounts, not more or stronger rights, but a reappraisal of law's constitutive role in the commodification of labour, land and money. To this end, some prefigurative examples offer potential pathways for exploring what more inclusive markets might look like.

Associate Professor Clare Williams

Clare is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham, having previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Kent following her ESRC postdoctoral fellowship there. Clare's PhD, from the University of London, explored the ways that we do, talk and think about the relationships between law, economy, and society, and her monograph 'An Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined: Beyond Embeddedness' was published with Routledge in 2022. She has since extended this into the field of disability, drawing on her experiences of labour markets during lockdown as a disabled researcher to develop the theory of ability capitalism.

She is a trustee of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) and co-chairs the SLSA EDI committee, as well as being active with DDPOs in her local area of south London.