Metanarratives of Disability Flyer (original) (raw)
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(DIS)LABELED: A Critique of the 'Disability' Discourse
How do social preconceptions develop, particularly when they are concerned with ‘disability?’ Democratic, industrial societies that most often embody tenets of Western capitalism play a dominant role in shaping global ideologies; consequently, the ways in which these societies construct meaning about ‘disability’ communities directly inform broader international opinions. The research presented in this thesis explores the culturally constructed stigma ascribed to the concept of intellectual ‘disability,’ considering in particular how an imbalance between power and knowledge can sway social relationships. Ultimately, those who hold power in the social world have far more resources that can be employed to control the dissemination of knowledge, which can obscure the perception of ‘disability’ as an identity category. This thesis asks: Why has stigma towards ‘disability’ communities emerged in dominant social and political thought, and how are these preconceptions reproduced? This question is answered in three stages: firstly, through a sociohistorical investigation of how cognitive deviations from the established norm have been managed by societies in the past; secondly, through a theoretical exploration of the systems of organization aggravating social inequalities; and lastly, through the evaluation of a sociolinguistic framework that both overtly and covertly reproduces an assumption of absolute difference between ability and disability. Ultimately, the research will demonstrate how social, cultural, and political barriers are far more disabling to individuals with intellectual exceptions than their biological realities.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015
In this article, I review seven books published in disability studies in 2013 and 2014. Two of the books deal exclusively with the North American context. The remaining five books focus primarily on areas outside North America, including Europe, Asia and Latin America. Two of the books are edited anthologies of new and original work. Four books are single-authored monographs and one book is co-authored. A search of new work published in 2013 and 2014 revealed more than twenty books. As a way of narrowing the focus and organizing the essay, I begin with a critique of key issues raised in Lennard J. Davis’ The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (UMichiganP [2013]) and go on to show how authors living and/or working in other parts of the world are engaging with, building on and diverging from what could be called a white, Western global North disability studies. In the end, I argue that decentring North American and UK disability studies reveals significant field-changing insights that will no doubt have profound and lasting effects on the study of disability and disabled people in the humanities and social sciences.
Review of The Biopolitics of Disability by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
ALH Online Review, 2018
The Biopolitics of Disability picks up where their previous book Cultural Locations of Disability (2006) left off: with the "feedback loops between disability and neoliberalism" (165). In Cultural Locations, they argued that eugenics-which views disability as a biological defect-underwrote the liberal state's disciplinary strategies (forced sterilization, institutionalization, and segregation) for turning populations into productive bodies. The replacement of liberal apparatuses of exclusion with neoliberal strategies of inclusion might seem, then, a story of progress. Not so. Set in the late twentieth-century shift from Fordist production to post-Fordist consumption, Biopolitics limns the perils that assimilation and integration pose for disabled people. Although meaningful, the hard-won recognition, access, and rights achieved since the 1970s tend to normalize and universalize disability, thereby effacing the varieties of disabled experience. But in addition to examining the transformation of disability from a medical condition into a site of conditional acceptance, Mitchell and Snyder make a powerful case for disability as a way of being and being-with that imagines and pursues "other worlds."
Editors' Introduction: A New Direction in the Sociology of Disability
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Disability, 2023
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Disability provides a timely and comprehensive overview of the wide range and depth of sociological theory and research on disability-brought together for the rst time in one volume. Each section of the Handbook incorporates a uniquely sociological perspective, presented by experts on intersecting social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of disability and complementing disability scholarship. The 37 chapters in this Handbook, organized into three major sections, provide an assessment of where we have been, where we are now, and where we must go with research on and in the sociology of disability. The rst section, De ning, Measuring, and Understanding Disability, reviews frameworks foundational to the study of disability, pushes for the inclusion of broader global perspectives, and addresses important dimensions of representation. The second section, Experiencing Disability across the Life Course, presents a combination of perspectives that tie together individual biography, societal, and historical contexts, while emphasizing continuity and change in the dynamic processes linking individuals, institutions, and structures over time. In the third section, Disability, Policy, and the Law, chapters investigate the reproduction of inequality through law, policy, and related institutions and systems, while highlighting how social and political participation empowers people with disabilities and helps to mitigate inequalities and social marginalization. The chapters included in this volume o er a multifaceted resource for students and experienced scientists alike on historical developments, main standards, key issues, and current challenges in the sociological study of disability at the global, national, and regional levels.
given me much support and encouragement along the way to here, for which I am very grateful. I am indebted to the active student members of the seminar courses and voluntary reading groups with whom various aspects of this book have been put through the discussion wringer. I am especially grateful to Terri Pitts and Barbara Barker, who helped proof-read. Dan and Annette Ahem encouraged me throughout the writing of the book and offered me an unwavering belief that the project would come to fmition. Their sensitivity and humour were invaluable sources of support to me. xiv Acknowledgments Lindsay MeVicar responded to much of this work, offering many thought-provoking comments. Dan and Judy Macinnes contributed many good thoughts and shared many good times with me when I most needed them. Judy treated both my writing of the manuscript and its potential publication as an unquestionable matter of fact. I am especially grateful to Dan Macinnes, who was the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology while I was writing this book. Against many odds, Dan treated me as a bona fide and valuable colleague, supported the continuation of my teaching, and encouraged me to teach courses that would enhance my writing. My deepest respect and gratitude I give to Rod Michalko. A life with him in blindness has made for much reading and many wonderful conversations, and has filled them, as well as this book, with vigour and life. I thank him also for maintaining a faith in me that I could not develop or maintain on my own. The provocation of his life, work, and wisdom has taught me the importance of developing a sociological stance that can speak to embodiment and to the moral implications behind being-in-the-world as disabled people.
Mainstream philosophers take for granted that disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That these assumptions are contestable, that it might be the case that disability is a historically and culturally specific, contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a natural attribute or property that certain people possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained. This chapter draws on the insights of Michel Foucault to advance a historicist and relativist conception of disability as an apparatus (dispositif) of power and identify mechanisms of power within philosophy that produce the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in the discipline.