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For the concept of inclusion in organizational culture, see the article Inclusion (value and practice).

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Inclusion is a term used by people with disabilities and other disability rights advocates for the idea that all people should freely, openly and without pity accommodate any person with a disability without restrictions or limitations of any kind.

Inclusion goes beyond mainstreaming, which is limited to putting a person with a disability next to typical people, in hope that each will adapt to and learn about the other. Although the concept of inclusion began as a way to ensure that disabled children were educated at the same school they would have attended if not disabled,^{[citation needed]} inclusion today is considered an all-encompassing practice of ensuring that people of differing abilities belong, are engaged, and are connected to the goals and objectives of the whole wider society.

This attitude is quite divergent from the prevailing attitude in most countries. Inclusion's opposite tends to be an attitude or undercurrent of pity and/or sorrow among the population of people without disabilities towards people with disabilities, and, among the medical community, an attitude of over-medicalization (see Medical model of disability) — focusing constantly on the physical and/or mental therapies, medications, surgeries and assistive devices that might help to "normalize" the disabled person as much as possible to their surrounding environment, thus making such a person's life in the "normal world" that much more bearable. The attitude of inclusion, which has a lot in common with the social model of disability, alleges that this entire approach is wrong and that those who have physical, sensory and/or intellectual impairments are automatically put on a much more effective and fulfilling road to full participation in society if they are, instead, looked at and valued by society from the outset as totally "normal" people who just happen to have these "extra differences."

The late Prime Minister Olof Palme of Sweden, speaking at the Stanford University Law School in the 1970s, summed up the divergence between U.S. and Swedish attitudes towards people with disabilities: Americans regard the able-bodied and the disabled as, effectively, actively or not, whether consciously or subconsciously, two separate species. Swedes regard them as humans in different life stages: all babies are helpless, cared for by parents; sick people are cared by those who are well; elderly people are cared by those younger and healthier, etc. Able-bodied people are able to help those who need it, without pity, because they know their turn at not being able-bodied will come. Palme maintained that if it cost the country $US 40,000 per year to enable a person with a disability to work at a job that paid $40,000, the society gained a net benefit, because the society benefited by allowing this worker to participate cooperatively, rather than to be a drain on other people's time and money.

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The prevailing pity-based attitude, as well as the physical inaccessibility related to ableism, tends to be the case regardless of a country's industrialization; e.g., in the United States as in Thailand there remains more in common attitudinally with pity than with inclusion.^{[citation needed]} However, the reasons for this phenomenon in the United States than in other industrialized countries such as Canada and the UK, are not entirely clear.^{[original research?]} Some say that the older architecture of the United States' more prominent cities make structural adjustment for disabled people costly and impractical, leading indirectly to a high measure of hostility towards disabled people lest they end up feeling entitled to receive such adjustments unquestionably. Others tend to blame the attitude of Social Darwinism more generally, accusing it of corrupting the attitude of "normal" able-bodied people in the United States towards disabled people in essentially all areas — often to the point that it prevents that country's culture from readily accepting disabled people as totally full and equal members of society in aspects and venues that are not directly legality or law-related, e.g. theater, film, dance, and sexuality. (See also the article Ableism.) Like the social movements of feminism, anti-racism and gay rights before it, inclusion is often derided by critics from the right as naïve, and by critics from the left as identity politics. As it looks less towards overcoming and achieving and more towards being and existing in the moment, inclusion by its nature forces others in the world towards acceptance of bodily forms and processes they may not be immediately comfortable with.

In the United States, a movement toward inclusion is taking shape most noticeably in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Arts events such as the DisThis! Film Series, AXIS Dance Company, dance performance by Lisa Bufano through Heidi Latsky, Theater By The Blind, Visible Theater and Nicu's Spoon are part of this emerging phenomenon, helped along to a large degree by Lawrence Carter-Long, a nationally-acknowledged U.S. advocate and orator in the disability rights field with spastic diplegia.

• Ableism
• Social model of disability
• Piss on pity
• Disability studies

• Disabled Peoples' International (global inclusion network)
• The Disabilities Network of New York City
• Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts
• American Association of People with Disabilities
• Alliance for Technology Access
• Center for Disability Law and Policy
• Ragged Edge Online
• "The Social Movement Left Out" - Z Magazine article by Marta Russell
• On Exclusivity
• Salva Vita Hungarian foundation working on inclusion of persons with mental disabilities, in Hungarian and English
• The Bubel Aiken Foundation
• Note on Salva Vita Foundation, in Polish, by Grazyna Krzywkowska, 2006.
• Hallatlan Foundation Hungarian foundation working on inclusion of persons with hearing disability and popularization of Hungarian sign language, in Hungarian and English
• Kids Together, Inc An unfunded volunteer non-profit promoting inclusion.
• www.isja.org.uk Inclusion and Social Justice Articles