Mike Oliver (disability advocate)

Oliver gave the social model its name in 1983 and spent his career, at Kent and then Greenwich, turning it into an argument policymakers could not ignore: if disability is created by inaccessible buildings, transport and attitudes, the remedy is to change them, not to "fix" people. His book The Politics of Disablement (1990) is the readable statement. Critics, including disabled scholars such as Tom Shakespeare, argue it underplays pain and impairment; Oliver defended it as a political tool, not a full theory.