The Minded Body in Technology and Disability

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Shew
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Technology Leaders ◽  
Mind And Body

This chapter critically examines futuristic and transhumanist rhetoric about cyborg bodies, exoskeletons, and prostheses in the context of traditional philosophical accounts of the nature of mind and body. Finding that these whiz-bang accounts of future tech and the nature of body and mind mutually reinforce each other, this chapter then argues that a critical lens from disability studies provides better ways to talk about the experience of mind and body, and that the affirmation of cyborg expertise is crucial to reconsidering and re-forming both a philosophy of bodyminds and of our technological futures. Cast as first-adopters while also being imagined away (with the idea that technologies will make us nondisabled), technologized disabled people (or cyborgs) have ideas about bodies and technology that don’t match the technological dreams of elite designers and technology leaders. Relying on the testimony and experiences of disabled people helps us reimagine our technological futures.

scholarly journals Imagining Accessibility: Theorizing Disability in Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Holder
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Medical Model Of Disability ◽  
Selection Of

With its emphasis on futurity, its close association with scientific plausibility, and its dedicated interrogation of contemporary ideologies, science fiction stands as a genre ripe with possibilities for disability studies. Many scholars have used the genre and its texts as platforms from which to either condemn or laud representations of disability within a field explicitly concerned with a society's future. My essay contributes to this discussion by foregrounding a science fiction text to theorize what a disabled future looks like. I take as my primary text a selection of short fiction from Uncanny Magazine, an online magazine that published a disability-themed issue Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction in 2018. The stories contained are penned exclusively by authors that identify as disabled; their visions of a disabled future, then, emerge from the contemporary experience of the disabled community. In addition to centering themselves in the discourse, these writers envision a disabled future as one that emphasizes community and frequently critiques and interrogates the costs, emotional and physical, inherent in the medical model of disability, announcing that a truly disabled future is one that features rather than erases the disabled mind and body. Running with the banner of destroying SF, these writers challenge the conventional, harmful tropes that SF has perpetuated and erects in its place an inclusive, intersectional, and disabled future.

Disability and Work During the Industrial Revolution in Britain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Blackie
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Industrial Sites ◽  
The Past ◽  
Paid Employment

A common claim in disability studies is that industrialization has marginalized disabled people by limiting their access to paid employment. This claim is empirically weak and rests on simplified accounts of industrialization. Use of the British coal industry during the period 1780–1880 as a case study shows that reassessment of the effect of the Industrial Revolution is in order. The Industrial Revolution was not as detrimental to the lives of disabled people as has often been assumed. While utopian workplaces for disabled people hardly existed, industrial sites of work did accommodate quite a large number of workers with impairments. More attention therefore needs to be paid to neglected or marginalized features of industrial development in the theorization of disability. Drawing on historical research on disability in the industrial workplace will help scholars better understand the significance of industrialization to the lives of disabled people, both in the past and the present.

Compulsory Feralization: Institutionalizing Disability Studies

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 627-634
Author(s):  
David T. Mitchell ◽  
Sharon L. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
The Past ◽  
The University

While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.

Choreographing the Chronic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick McKelvey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Hiv Aids

“Choreographing the Chronic” brings together dance studies, queer disability studies, and performance studies to examine Octavio Campos’s 2007 dance-theater piece, The Bugchasers. The essay considers Campos’s work alongside other representations of bugchasers—people who deliberately pursue HIV—in popular journalism, queer theory, and social media. It argues that Campos’s work illuminates what these other representations obfuscate: that bugchasers stage alternative temporalities of seroconversion and HIV/AIDS more broadly. The bugchasers populating Campos’s piece thwart seroconversion’s prominence as ostensibly the most important event governing queer life. By extension, they challenge dominant understandings of people with HIV and other disabled people deprived of the capacity to represent anything other than disablement.

scholarly journals Valuing Care and Support in an Era of Celebrating Independence: Disabled Young People’s Reflections on Their Meaning and Role in Their Lives

Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-413
Author(s):  
Janice McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Care And Support ◽  
Independent Life ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
The Right

The right to a supported independent life is a central dimension to disability politics. This focus has been used to challenge institutionalised living and the exclusion of disabled people from areas such as education and employment. The importance given to independence has also led to a critique of care. This critique has been a point of contention between disability studies and feminist theorising. In this article I argue it is important to return to these debates because contemporary conditions mean advocacy of independence is being co-opted into rhetorics of self-sufficiency. At the same time care on its own does not offer a productive alternative. The article draws from an ESRC project undertaken with disabled young people to advocate for the importance of both supported independence and of support being caring. It concludes by arguing that an expansive welfare state is required to create the conditions that can make that possible.

scholarly journals Rehabilitation as a Disability Equality Issue: A Conceptual Shift for Disability Studies?

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Shakespeare ◽  
Harriet Cooper ◽  
Dikmen Bezmez ◽  
Fiona Poland
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Rehabilitation Science ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Conceptual Shift ◽  
New Research ◽  
Rehabilitation Sciences

Rehabilitation is a controversial subject in disability studies, often discussed in terms of oppression, normalisation, and unwanted intrusion. While there may be good reasons for positioning rehabilitation in this way, this has also meant that, as a lived experience, it is under-researched and neglected in disabilities literature, as we show by surveying leading disability studies journals. With some notable exceptions, rehabilitation research has remained the preserve of the rehabilitation sciences, and such studies have rarely included the voices of disabled people themselves, as we also demonstrate by surveying a cross-section of rehabilitation science literature. Next, drawing on new research, we argue for reframing access to rehabilitation as a disability equality issue. Through in-depth discussion of two case studies, we demonstrate that rehabilitation can be a tool for inclusion and for supporting an equal life. Indeed, we contend that rehabilitation merits disability researchers’ sustained engagement, precisely to ensure that a ‘right-based rehabilitation’ policy and practice can be developed, which is <em>not</em> oppressive, but reflects the views and experiences of the disabled people who rehabilitation should serve.

scholarly journals Reviews of The New Political Economy of Disability by van Toorn & Disability and Neoliberal State Formations, by Soldatic

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-274
Author(s):  
Ravi Malhotra
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Australian State ◽  
Economic Marginalization

Two recent disability studies monographs from Routledge devoted in part to the Australian state and its policies with respect to disabled people break exciting new ground in analyzing the economic marginalization of disabled people and how to empower them. Both volumes are creative, well-researched, and thoughtful contributions to disability studies because of the questions they pose and the insightful, novel ways they encourage us to think about the questions.

scholarly journals Review of Approaching Disability by Mallett & Runswick-Cole

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Diane Driedger
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Critical Issues

Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and Perspectives, by Rachel Mallett and Katherine Runswick-Cole, is meant to be an introductory text for disability studies at the undergraduate and graduate studies levels, and for disabled people and scholars in general.

scholarly journals Exploring the social legacy of paralympic games for disabled people

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Lyusyena Kirakosyan ◽  
Manoel Osmar Seabra Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Central Research ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Critical Disability Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Paralympic Games

While the concept of legacy of sporting mega-events has been highly debated and filled with the promise to deliver tangible and measurable benefits, in the context of the Paralympics, defining legacy has been a challenge, due to a lack of universally understood and accepted nature and objectives of the Paralympic Games themselves. Although many authors and disability rights activists expect the Paralympics to accelerate agenda of inclusion of disabled people, a growing number of studies found that the Paralympics misrepresent disability and the reality of disabled people, and consequently reinforce negative stereotypes. Informed by critical disability studies, the central research aim of this article is to examine the social legacies of the 2012 and 2016 Paralympic Games for disabled people as identified in the media coverage of three selected periodicals, The Guardian, and O Globo. The article presents a summary of the qualitative analysis of the media coverage related to the topic of Paralympic legacy and disability rights, highlights its central themes and offers a discussion of the findings through the lens of critical disability studies.

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