78 Media International Australia Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin Abstract This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses the relative absence of explicit discussion and research on disability in the literatures on community, citizen and alternative media. By contrast, disability has emerged as an important element of participatory cultures and digital technologies. To explore disability participatory cultures, the article offers analysis of case studies, including disability blogs, ABC’s Ramp Up website and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter). In a wide range of ways, disability is now widely recognised as an important issue in society, politics, everyday life and media. Oficial statistics suggest that just under one in ive Australians has a disability (some 18.5 per cent or 4.2 million people on 2012 igures – ABS 2013). Ways of approaching and deining disability vary, but here we take a social, cultural and political approach that is inluenced by critical disability studies, as well as media and cultural studies, sociology, and science and technology studies (Ellis and Goggin, 2015). By doing so, we relect the widespread view that disability is very much a social phenomenon, with key social determinants, contexts and dynamics, rather than something to be categorised as a medical or health phenomenon. Broadly speaking, this is the understanding of disability adopted in the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In accordance with strict versions of the ‘social model’ of disability, one could draw a strict line between impairments (as the bodily experience) and disability (as the social creation of unnecessary barriers, exclusion and discrimination). One might have a particular impairment, but be ‘disabled’ or ‘enabled’ by social arrangements – something relected in the preferred UK terminology of ‘disabled person’. In fact, the social model and much subsequent disability research and theory acknowledge and explore the luid nature of disability and impairment (Shakespeare, 2006; Swain et al., 2014). We are especially interested in the ways in which culture and its meanings and mechanisms are foundational to the creation of disability in society – not just to people with disabilities, but to all of us (Ellis, 2015; Goggin and Newell, 2005). This is because disability is deeply implicated in what we regard as ‘normal’ (Davis, 1995): an ‘ableism’ that has a signiicant role in how societies are arranged, governed and controlled. As Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009) has shown, ‘abledness’ is produced along with ‘disability’. Given the signiicance of disability in society, it is heartening that there is a inally a burgeoning body of work on the representation of people with disabilities, and their experience, across the full range of contemporary media (Ellis et al., 2017; Rodan et al., 2014; Ellis, 2015). There is growing engagement with people with disabilities DISABILITY MEDIA PARTICIPATION: OPPORTUNITIES, OBSTACLES AND POLITICS