Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence: New Insights from Dr Tom Campbell

Dr Tom Campbell has recently published his new book ‘Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence: A Social Theory Perspective on Disability in Solid and Liquid Modernity’.

Following this publication, Dr Tom Campbell has shared insigns about his book, the research process, and what he has planned next.

Please tell us about your new book

Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence: A Social Theory Perspective on Disability in Solid and Liquid Modernity begins from a simple but demanding claim: that the disabling society is inhuman – and because it is made by human hands, it can be unmade.

What I argue is that disability isn’t a marginal issue or a specialist concern. It reveals something fundamental about how modern societies organise human worth.

By bringing Disability Studies into dialogue with Zygmunt Bauman’s work on solid and liquid modernity, the book shows that the exclusion of disabled people is not accidental – it is built into the very ways we value productivity, independence, and speed.

Can you give an insight into the research process and journey leading up to publication?

This book grew out of a long engagement with Bauman’s work, but also a frustration. Disability is largely absent from the social theory canon, even where thinkers are concerned with power, embodiment, and ethics.

A key moment for me was encountering Bill Hughes’ essay on Bauman and disability, alongside Bauman’s own short piece, “Society Enables and Disables”. Together, they opened up a line of thought that I felt needed to be developed much further.

Working with Bauman’s archive – including texts that have not been widely available in English, particularly through the three volumes we edited – allowed me to reconstruct a broader picture of his thinking. At the same time, Disability Studies provided a critical lens that exposed both the strengths and the limits of that tradition.

The book emerges at that intersection – I hope I show how these two bodies of work begin to transform each other.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

I hope readers come away with a different sense of what disability is. Not as an individual tragedy or a marginal identity, but as a category – even a moral value – that tells us how society itself is organised: who is valued, who is excluded, and on what terms.

More broadly, I hope it encourages a rethinking of human worth. If we move away from productivity as the measure of value, then entirely different ways of organising society become possible

What is next for you?

I am Deputy Director (Education) at the Leeds Institute for Societal Futures, so I am currently overseeing the development of our educational portfolio.

In research terms, I’m continuing to develop these ideas in a more explicitly political direction. I have an upcoming essay in Thesis Eleven that returns to Bauman’s lifelong search for politics through the lens of disability, particularly in relation to productivism, automation, and the changing organisation of work. It asks what this might mean for a contemporary socialist politics.

Alongside that, I’m co-writing a short book with Professor Hannah Morgan on the abolitionist politics of the disabled people’s movement, drawing on archival work around UPIAS. That project takes seriously the movement’s original challenge – not inclusion within existing systems, but what it means to be against segregation: the dismantling of the social relations that produce disablement.

At the same time, I’m working on a very different kind of project – a co-written book of letters with Angela Newton, with whom I have a long-standing teaching collaboration grounded in object-based learning. That project brings together theory, reading, and lived experience in a more reflective form, asking what it means to read in an age of screens saturated with automated text.

Interested to find out more? Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence: A Social Theory Perspective on Disability in Solid and Liquid Modernity is available here.