The Social Construction of Disability: The Impact of Statistics and Technology

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Shogan
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Construction Of Disability ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Social Construction Of Disability

This paper aims to foster a discussion about the social construction of disability within adapted physical activity. Social construction of disability refers to the social history of disability and the social contexts that both enable and disable individuals who negotiate these contexts. Statistics and technology are introduced in this paper to illustrate that “the normal,” “the abnormal,” “the natural,” “the unnatural,” “ability,” and “disability” have emerged historically and to demonstrate that these concepts are implicated in social contexts. Work in the history of statistics is drawn upon to establish that the normal is a fairly recent notion in the English language. It is argued that statistics, as a normalization discourse, sustain artificial demarcations between ability and disability and the normal and abnormal when used by researchers and practitioners. To expose assumptions about natural ability, technological-assisted performance for participants with or without disabilities in physical activity and sport are addressed.

scholarly journals The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560–1640

2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER MARSHALL
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called ‘decline of hell’.

scholarly journals ‘It’s not about disability, I want to win as many medals as possible’: The social construction of disability in high-performance coaching

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C Townsend ◽  
Tabo Huntley ◽  
Christopher J Cushion ◽  
Hayley Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Disability Sport ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Performance Coaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
Construction Of Disability ◽  
Social Construction Of Disability

This article draws on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu to provide a critical analysis of the social construction of disability in high-performance sport coaching. Data were generated using a qualitative cross-case comparative methodology, comprising 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in high-performance disability sport, and interviews with coaches and athletes from a cross-section of Paralympic sports. We discuss how in both cases ‘disability’ was assimilated into the ‘performance logic’ of the sporting field as a means of maximising symbolic capital. Furthermore, coaches were socialised into a prevailing legitimate culture in elite disability sport that was reflective of ableist, performance-focused and normative ideologies about disability. In this article we unpack the assumptions that underpin coaching in disability sport, and by extension use sport as a lens to problematise the construction of disability in specific social formations across coaching cultures. In so doing, we raise critical questions about the interrelation of disability and sport.

Art and its Objects: William Ivins and the Reproduction of Art

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 65-98
Author(s):  
Gordon Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Reproduction ◽  
The Relationship

This paper is a critique of the contribution of William Ivins's Prints and Visual Communication (1953) to an understanding of the meaning of fine art reproductions. Ivins showed that photographic reproduction was constructed in relation to, and displaced, older ways of reproducing art which were carried out by handicraft engravers. His analysis alerts us to the fact that ambiguity characterized art reproduction before photographs. Art reproductions, then, were interpretations in line based on conventional modes of representation – what Ivins calls a visual syntax. In this respect he enhances our understanding of the social construction of the artist. For Ivins the social history of reproduction seems to end with the camera. This completed an individuation of creativity ushered in with the Renaissance, but which was always qualified by the interfering visual syntax of craftsmen-interpreters. It is argued that the value of Ivins's account resides in its reconstruction of the relationship between handicraft engraving, fine art reproduction and aesthetic objects that have long since slipped from our consciousness.

Popular Culture, Violence, and Religion in Gloria's Story

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Wertheimer
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
Wealth Concentration ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Hospital Births ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

One of the most vexing challenges accompanying any attempt to reconstruct the legal history of the family is deciding how much interpretive weight to assign to social factors as opposed to legal factors. “Gloria's Story” is loaded with social history, in part because it focuses on a small group of decidedly non-elite characters. It discusses non-legal matters as big as the impact of wealth concentration on the Guatemalan family and as small as the social significance of home births, as opposed to hospital births, in Quetzaltenango during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the most important factors driving the analysis are legal, not social. The article's central argument—that “modernizing” legal reforms adopted in Guatemala since the mid-nineteenth century have fortified, not weakened, adulterous concubinage—emphasizes the effects of legal change.

Aḥmad Yasavī and the Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshān: Towards a New Social History of Sufi-Shīʿī Relations in Central Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 643-681
Author(s):  
Daniel Beben
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This article examines how a text attributed to the renowned Central Asian Sufi figure Aḥmad Yasavī came to be found within a manuscript produced within the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī community of the Shughnān district of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia. The adoption of this text into an Ismāʿīlī codex suggests an exchange between two disparate Islamic religious traditions in Central Asia between which there has hitherto been little evidence of contact. Previous scholarship on Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relations has focused predominately on the literary and intellectual engagement between these traditions, while the history of persecution experienced by the Ismāʿīlīs at the hands of Sunnī Muslims has largely overshadowed discussions of the social relationship between the Ismāʿīlīs and other Muslim communities in Central Asia. I demonstrate that this textual exchange provides evidence for a previously unstudied social engagement between Ismāʿīlī and Sunnī communities in Central Asia that was facilitated by the rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century. The mountainous territory of Shughnān, where the manuscript under consideration originated, has been typically represented in scholarship as isolated prior to the onset of colonial interest in the region in the late 19th century. Building upon recent research on the impact of early modern globalization on Central Asia, I demonstrate that even this remote region was significantly affected by the intensification of globalizing processes in the century preceding the Russian conquest. Accordingly, I take this textual exchange as a starting point for a broader re-evaluation of the Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relationship in Central Asia and of the social ‘connectivity’ of the Ismāʿīlīs and the Badakhshān region within early modern Eurasia.

scholarly journals The role of Kazan therapists in the development of the direction of Botkin's scientific research and clinical practice in the first half of the twentieth century

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-399
Author(s):  
V I Borodulin ◽  
V Yu Albitsky
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Scientific Heritage ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Therapeutic Schools ◽  
The Impact

The article highlights the formation of scientific therapeutic schools in Kazan using the comparative-historical method from the position of the modern concept of scientific school. Founded by the first of Botkin's student N.A. Vinogradov, the affiliate Botkin's scientific school initiated the creation of therapeutic schools at Kazan University in the first half of the XX century, originating in the second or third generation directly from S.P. Botkin. The activities of prominent Kazan therapists and their role in the formation of scientific schools are considered based on the approach of the social history of medicine the impact of the social changes in Russia in 1917 and the beginning of the Civil War. Having established a center for the development of the scientific heritage of the great Russian clinician in Kazan, the clinical schools of A.N. Kazem-Bek, S.S. Zimnitsky, M.N. Cheboksarov, and N.K. Goryaev played a huge role in the development of Botkins direction of domestic internal medicine.

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