scholarly journals Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight

Con Texte ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21
Author(s):  
Martin Boucher

In this short work, the author will reflect on how we might understand the technology-subject relationship in a way that equally captures the position of the individual with a disability and that of the interplanetary astronaut. The works of Tamar Sharon in mediated posthumanism and Dan Goodley in critical disability studies will be consulted. This cursory exploration will conclude that both the astronaut and the individual with a disability are congruent posthuman subjects insofar as their relationship to technology challenges the idea of a transhumanist overcoming of human limits. Exploring this relationship can tell us something about how posthuman subjects may be understood more generally.   Critical Disability Studies, Mediated Posthumanism, Mediation, Reflexivity, Originary Prostheticity, Tamar Sharon, Dan Goodley

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
Tine Fristrup ◽  
Christopher Karanja Odgaard

This article investigates the emerging field of critical disability studies in order to explore understandings of disability and prosthesis through the intersection of dis/ability studies, studies in ableism, and philosophical enquiries into the biopolitics of disability and neoliberal psychopolitics. We present the interpretation that contemporary Western ableism is confi gured by neoliberal arrangements operating on the individual in ongoing processes of self-improvement. People who fail in the achievement society see themselves as being responsible for their own situation, blaming themselves as individuals instead of questioning the ableism that organises contemporary societal orderings in the neoliberal production of inferiority. We offer a conceptual framework of neodisability by unfolding internalised disabling processes in which the bifurcation of ‘dis’ and ‘ability’ operates through the forward-slash in dis/ability. The forward-slash captivates the optimistic cruelty in the workings of contemporary ableism in search of excellence through prosthetic confi gurations in an achievement economy: desiring the invisible prosthesis of willpower in the constant pursuit of overcoming the ‘dis/’. Neodisability engenders contemporary psycho-neoliberal-ableism, with people turning their aggressions against themselves in never-ending processes of dis-ing parts of themselves as ‘notfit-enough’, while being in constant need of therapeutic interventions to employ and promote the self-optimising efforts in times of neodisableism.


Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-244
Author(s):  
Hannah Thompson

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 404-413
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kapeller ◽  
Michael H. Nagenborg ◽  
Kostas Nizamis

AbstractRecently, several research projects in the Netherlands have focused on the development of wearable robotic exoskeletons (WREs) for individuals with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Such research on WREs is often treated solely within the disciplines of biomedical and mechanical engineering, overlooking insights from disability studies and philosophy of technology. We argue that mainly two such insights should receive attention: the problematization of the ableism connected to the individual model of disability and the stigmatization by assistive technology. While disability studies have largely rejected the individual model of disability, the engineering sciences seem to still locate disability in an individual’s body, not questioning their own problematization of disability. Additionally, philosophy of technology has argued that technologies are not neutral instruments but shape users’ actions and perceptions. The design of WREs may convey a message about the understanding of disability, which can be comprehended as a challenge and an opportunity: stigmatization needs to be avoided and positive views on disability can be evoked. This article aims to highlight the benefits of considering these socio-philosophical perspectives by examining the case of WREs for people with DMD and proposing design principles for WREs. These principles may enhance acceptability of WREs, not only by individuals with DMD but also by other users, and help engineers to better place their work in the social context.


2015 ◽  
pp. 108-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimi Hamraie

In this article, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by examining Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. Although the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as an advancement upon moral and medical authority and a replacement of it by sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the more comprehensive frame in which these models circulate—the “models framework”—requires the more nuanced approach that historical epistemology offers. In particular, the models framework requires greater use of epistemology as an analytical tool for understanding the historical construction of disability. Thus, I turn to Foucault’s History of Madness in order to both excavate one particular archaeological strand in the text—the archaeology of cure—and to demonstrate how this narrative disrupts some of the key assumptions of the models framework, challenging DS to consider the epistemological force of non-medical fields of knowledge for framing disability and procedures for its cure and elimination. I conclude by arguing that DS must develop historical epistemological methodologies that are sensitive to the complex overlays of moral, medical, and social knowledge, as well as attend to the social construction of scientific and biomedical knowledge itself.


Lateral ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jina B Kim

Response to Julie Avril Minich, "Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now," published in Lateral 5.1. Kim elaborates upon a crip-of-color critique, which has possibilities to both criticize structures that inherently devalue humans and to take action to work toward justice. Kim’s final call is to identify and act against the inequalities and harm of academic labor, urging readers to take seriously a “politics of refusal” that might help academics of color survive through alternative collectivities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 351-363
Author(s):  
Amy L. Hubbell

From 2012 to 2016, three French women published autobiographies about surviving bombings as children during the Algerian War (1954-1962). Danielle Michel-Chich who survived the Milk Bar bombing in Algiers in 1956 published an open letter to Zohra Drif, the woman who placed the bomb in the restaurant (Lettre à Zohra D., 2012), and Pied-Noir artist Nicole Guiraud who survived the same event published her diary Algérie 1962: Journal de l’Apocalypse in 2013. Nicole Simon who survived a bombing at a concert in Mostaganem, Algeria published her autobiography, La Bombe: Mostaganem, j’avais quinze ans, in 2016. In these works, the women relate in different ways how they negotiated their injured bodies at home in Algeria as well as in a tense political climate in France during and after the war. In this article I analyze survivor autobiographies to elucidate how transformed bodies impact the individual who survived the trauma but also how and why these women alternately hide their wounds to accommodate the people around them or accept and respond to the stares upon their bodies. By engaging with disability studies, I examine how the discomfort of the transformed body, for both the victims and the people who see them, exemplifies the much larger tensions surrounding the painful memory of the Algerian War.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document