On 12 January 2024 at 12.15, Nathanje Dijkstra will defend her PhD dissertation ‘Making Up Incapacity for Work? How Government Officials, Medical Experts and Disabled Workers Brought Incapacity for Work into Being in the First Dutch Social Security Law (1901-1967)’. By targeting the cultural impact and by critically examining the practical and material consequences of the Ongevallenwet, Dijkstra aims to find out if disability benefit legislation brought disability into existence.

Ever since the introduction of the first act regulating the insurance of labourers in cases of accidents in the Netherlands, the Ongevallenwet (1901), politicians, doctors, and scholars have been discussing the political and economic effects of social security legislation. The regulations have constantly been tightened to make sure ‘the right people’ receive benefits, and to keep the welfare state affordable.

While these debates still make the headlines on a daily basis, there is a lack of fundamental research on how processes of in- and exclusion have affected notions of who ‘the right people’ actually are and what disability means in the context of the welfare state.

Dijkstra analyses the effect that in- and exclusion procedures of disability benefits had on the way people were identified. Disability benefit legislation necessitates classification. As philosophers of science have shown, classifications ensure that people adopt the way they are being described, but at the same time the classifications are also changed and adapted by people.

Hence, interaction with the classification therefore ‘makes up’ the group of people that are being classified. With this as her premise, Dijkstra wants to find out whether you can argue that disability legislation created disability.

More information: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/phd-defence-nathanje-dijkstra-is-disability-a-creation-of-disability-benefit-legislation