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Disability, economic agency, and embodied cognition

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Abstract

In this paper, I combine the actor-network economic sociology of disability with recent developments in phenomenological, embodied cognitive science, to discuss how ability, calculative agency, and meaning are distributed throughout materially situated sociocognitive systems. I begin by outlining the actor-network approach to disability, market formation, and economic agency. Next, I turn to the cognitive sciences, and describe the emergence of consciousness and meaning in embodied human being. With an operative synthesis of the two projects in place, I turn to government-organized disability savings plans in Canada. I suggest that the low uptake of these plans can be explained using the theoretical synthesis provided in the first two sections of this paper, giving a robust account of the threefold distribution of ability, calculative agency, and meaning.

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Notes

  1. Because they eschew strictly ‘natural’ or ‘social’ causalities, ANT perspectives on disablement can be contrasted with early formulations of disability, as in the ‘social model’, or its medical opposite (Oliver 1990; Leonardi et al. 2006; Shakespeare 2012; Martiny 2015). Though this departure means that ANT models mirror those of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (IFC) framework’s biopsychosocial perspective, the two are not identical. The ICF, for example, does not share ANT’s founding concern with material agency, or the radical contingency of enabling passages (as I examine below).

  2. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.

  3. Jensen (2009) gives an historical account of Schneider in Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty, critically examining the translation of the case from the former to the latter…

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Acknowledgments

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada generously supported this research. Thanks to Carlos Novas and James A. Shaw for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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  1. Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada

    Thomas Abrams

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Abrams, T. Disability, economic agency, and embodied cognition. Mind Soc 16, 81–94 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-016-0192-5

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