The Unruly Salon: unfasten your seatbelts, take no prisoners, make no apologies!

This article examines the multi‐faceted contributions of disability studies including the work of artists and scholars inspired by The Unruly Salon, a disability arts, culture and scholarship series held at Green College, the University of British Columbia January–March 2008 to substantive citizenship and cultural politics. The article examines various tropes of normalcy through the new epistemological and methodological lenses and resources posed by disability studies projects. It shows how social, structural, cultural and material barriers construct some as ‘disabled’ and others as non‐disabled and puts forward ways to connect social models and human rights’ frameworks with a cultural politics of situated disability narratives that have the power to perform back to such normalizing regimes through disability arts, culture and scholarship. In so doing, the article demonstrates how disability cultural politics and scholarship lay claim to specific transformative counter‐publics. Scholars in disability studies from the Unruly Salon marshal new and transformative forms of social citizenship by, with, and for disabled people to create generative and innovative public discourses about disability as difference. Qualitative research is challenged to think anew its methodologies and epistemologies in light of the powerful difference that disability variously makes.