[Perspectives] Tom Shakespeare: advocating for people with disabilities

“To be embodied is to be impaired”, says Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research and Co-Director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), London, UK. “Everybody has short-term or long-term impairments of the body or brain”, he says. “That is an inextricable part of being human. It's neither rare, nor exceptional…So if we're all a bit impaired, why are some of us ‘disabled’, and some not? Actually, we're all somewhere along that line.”