The impact of the social model of disability on contemporary academic,policy, practice and popular thinking about disability and disabled peoplecannot be overstated. It has been transformational in the way in which ithas named and challenged dominant conceptions of disability asimpairment, deficit and inherently individual and tragic.

Thereconceptualization of disability as a form of social oppression experiencedon top of impairment (UPIAS 1974, 1975) and as the basis for collectivepolitical action (Oliver 1990) has been revolutionary in its impact. Reading In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (2016)1while I was compiling this Book provided a helpful framework to explore myacademic and activist engagement with the social model.

I have foundSharpe's use of multiple understandings of the wake and particularly ofundertaking wake work valuable. For Sharpe the entirety of the meanings ofa wake as:keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence ofsomething in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening and consciousness(18)enable a form of "wake work" as an analytic in academic practice that'avails us particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imaging theworld' (22).

As such "being in the wake" is an ethical choice andengagement with a history, an evolving body of ideas and with imagined andas yet unimagined futures. .