This special issue of Social Text will examine discourses of physical debility and social mobility in concert with social movement politics, broadly construed.  The broader rubric of disability is an especially apt lens through which to launch a political agenda, if only because some scholars have argued that the potential for bodily frailty is a universal condition, that debility is a meta-identity that all human beings will eventually inhabit, whether through unforeseen accidents or through the presumed life course stages of aging.  If this argument provides a theoretical language through which to discuss shared forms of injury and suffering, it also potentially overlooks the fact that some people will inevitably find it more difficult than others to slide in and... >>