Abstract
In this chapter, I present disability as a relational concept, rather than a trans-situational characteristic that an individual can have. The argument is grounded in and illustrated by the author’s research on experiences of disability. Three distinct research projects are drawn on: (1) research with injured workers about their experiences, (2) research about the experiences of women who survived a stroke before age 50, and (3) research about the work experiences of academics who have multiple sclerosis (MS). All of this work considers the social and environmental context. That is, environments may be more or less accessible, but their accessibility is always a factor determined by the individuals who designed the environment, and who design environments based on who they envision will use them. The chapter also focuses on the fact that very few people in each group of research participants identified as disabled. Notably, participants often experienced being disabled by others because of the reactions of others to either their visible impairments or their apparent refusal to engage in expected activities. Accordingly, they were often unable to engage in desired occupations (broadly conceived), and this, rather than bodily limitations, is what was experienced as disabling.
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Notes
- 1.
“Women Survivors of Hemorrhagic Stroke.” Funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2002. Details about research methods can be found in Stone (2007).
- 2.
One group was interviewed for a research project titled “Injured Workers in Northwestern Ontario and the Effectiveness of Peer Support” funded by a grant from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (Ontario), 2001. Details about research methods can be found in Stone (2003). A second group was interviewed for a research project titled “Workers Compensation and the Consequences of Workplace Injury” funded by a Community-University Research Alliance grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2006 (Principal Investigator Emile Tompa). Details about research methods are as yet unpublished.
- 3.
“Chronic illness and the knowledge worker.” Funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2008 (Principal Investigator Valorie A. Crooks). Details about research methods can be found in Crooks et al. (2011).
- 4.
Both Goffman and Davis published these works before the rise of the disability rights movement or the development of a social model of disability to counter the hegemony of biomedicine. Accordingly, they wrote as though all reasonable people unquestionably accept the legitimacy of mainstream horror in the face of disability, and they used terms such as “physically handicapped” rather than modern terminology about disability. This limits the usefulness of their works for understanding disability in the contemporary context, yet as interview extracts suggest, there are still many disabled people with self-understandings similar to those studied by Goffman and Davis.
- 5.
As are all people continually vulnerable to being defined as incompetent.
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Stone, S.D. (2013). The Situated Nature of Disability. In: Cutchin, M., Dickie, V. (eds) Transactional Perspectives on Occupation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4429-5_8
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