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Understanding disabled youth activism is key for improving young disabled people's participation in politics and social change. Young disabled people require opportunities to situate historical and biographical experiences within broader socio-economic contexts. This will lead to a politicised consciousness surrounding disability, emancipation and social justice. This article presents empirical data from the first study on young disabled people's contemporary position within the UK Disabled People's Movement. It critically assesses three areas pertinent to youth activism: activist membership, social movement organisation and future considerations for activism. This allows for an exploration of how young disabled activists navigate collective action, influence activist claims and demands and understand the issues for sustaining a disabled people's social movement. The article illustrates young disabled activists' desire to disrupt their current position within the UK Disabled People's Movement and bring into focus a future where young disabled people's contributions to activism and social movements are accessible, valued and influential. The article argues that a failure to support young disabled people's participation within social movements will have an adverse impact on their political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the future is imagined through disability activism. It highlights how UK Disabled People's Movement members, established and newcomers, envisage inclusive and accessible societies and what role disability activism has in realising such visions. To achieve this, conceptualisations of the future are mapped within a framework of three topias (places/worlds): utopia, retrotopia and heterotopia. These topian configurations provide a way to make sense of activist visions for progressing disabled people's emancipation. The article argues that the UK Disabled People's Movement currently produces two dominant conceptualisations of the future: a deterministic, radical overhaul of political and economic arrangements (utopia); and a return to 'purer' forms of disability activism produced by historical activists and their networks (retrotopia). Young disabled activists who do not align with such conceptualisations are denied opportunities to influence broad activist strategies and are, instead, relegated to opportunities that necessitate a youth perspective. Young disabled activist's conceptualisations of the future can be best understood as the production of counter sites, which generate activities, politics and discourses around notions of inclusion, social justice and accessibility (heterotopia). These produce possible and preferable alternatives to the current ordering of the social world – with disability activism becoming spaces that encourage creativity of new ideas, new practices and new options against existing norms and inaccessible worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]