  Conducting disability studies in these disciplines has to a large degree been a matter of applying well-known interpretive techniques to subjects whom historical and literary scholarship previously ignored. Thus, for example, most historical scholarship about disability has aimed at reporting about the marginalized lives of individuals with physical, cognitive, or psychological impairments. Historical accounts of how such individuals fared in a particular society and a particular era are informed by familiar theories about the political function of social roles, applied to the status to which disabled people in that historical period were assigned. (To sample a disability studies approach to intellectual history, see Kudlick and Longmore 2006, on how disability shaped Habermas's philosophy.) Similarly, studies of symbolic presentations of disability mostly interpret representations (either fictional or biographical) of individuals whose characterization is inflected by attribution of one or another impairment. Scholarship about what such representations mean in a particular creative work usually is propelled by one or another familiar theory about the aesthetic, psychological, political or other function of symbolic roles, applied to disabled characters and characterizations of their disabilities. (See Silvers 2000 for a discussion of literary theory in disability studies.)