Strategic approaches to disability disclosure on social media

Persons with physical disabilities often face isolation in face-to-face settings or limited opportunities to form relationships due to an ongoing, and often derogatory, disability narrative of difference. Unlike face-to-face interactions, social media let persons with disabilities control how and when they disclose information about their disabilities and offer new opportunities for relationship formation. This qualitative study establishes a theoretical framework for exploring how and why persons with physical disabilities choose to disclose their disabilities on social media platforms. Major findings from the study describe three strategic approaches (open, secure, and limited) to disability disclosure on social media. The study also examines the relationship between age of discloser and age of the disability as key factors in approach selection.     

The emancipation of disability studies in Portugal

Despite the interest of the social sciences in issues of exclusion and inequality, the question of disability, as a key issue of reflection, remains absent from many academic areas. The emergence of disability studies owes much to contexts in which the activism of disabled people has revealed the structural conditions that oppress and neglect experiences of disability. Bearing in mind the specific features of the Portuguese socio-political environment, two lines of inquiry are developed in this text. Firstly, what are the challenges faced by Portuguese academics in making disability a central issue, enabling it to confront the silencing of the voices and experiences of disabled people in society? Secondly, how important is it for research to engage with an ethical and political paradigm that supports the rights of disabled people?     

Ethical challenges of life story research with ex‐prisoners with intellectual disability

This paper outlines the ethical considerations when engaging in life story research with ex‐prisoners with intellectual disability. Based on a study conducted in Queensland, Australia, the authors explore some of the challenges that have arisen through the lens of principle‐based ethics. The significant disadvantage experienced by ex‐prisoners with intellectual disability warrants further attention by social researchers, and care must be taken not to further harm this group through the research process. Issues pertaining to the broad ethical concepts of integrity, justice, respect for persons and beneficence are examined to identify the degree to which they can guide the actions of the life story researcher. Examples are given as to how the researcher responded to difficulties as they arose and the authors discuss ways forward from a principle‐based approach.     

Feeling disability: theories of affect and critical disability studies

This paper explores connections between affect studies and critical disability studies. Our interest in affect is sparked by the beginnings of a new research project that seeks to illuminate the lives, hopes and desires of young people with ‘life-limiting’ or ‘life-threatening’ impairments. Cultural responses to these young people are shaped by dominant discourses associated with lives lived well and long. Before commencing our empirical work with young people we use this paper to think through how we might conceptualise affect and disability. We present three themes; ontological invalidation in neoliberal-able times; affect aliens and crip killjoys; disability and resistant assemblages.     

Dis/entangling critical disability studies

Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging insights, including theorizing through materialism, bodies that matter, inter/trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and Other. I briefly disentangle these themes and suggest that while we may well start with disability, we often never end with it as we engage with other transformative arenas including feminist, critical race and queer theories. Yet critical disability studies reminds us of the centrality of disability when we consider the politics of life itself. In this sense, then, disability becomes entangled with other forms of oppression and revolutionary responses.     

Acquired disability in young women: a challenge for identity?

ABSTRACT

Youth can be described as a transitional phase for the formation of identity. As young people often hold taken-for-granted assumptions regarding their future, disability may pose a challenge for their identity development. This paper analyses the retrospectively written autobiographical narratives by three young women who became disabled during their adolescence. The structure of the narratives is approached with sociologist Arthur Frank’s typology of illness narratives and identity through data-driven content analysis. This paper suggests that chaotic stories may hinder the development of identity, as the identity is described as delayed, hidden, silenced or neglected.     

Moral wrongs,disadvantages, and disability: a critique of critical disability studies

Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS.     

The Hungry‐for‐Attention Metaphor: Integrating Narrative and Behavioural Therapy for Families With Attention Seeking Children

Many families come to treatment with concerns about attention‐seeking children. This paper examines the dominant socio‐cultural and biological influences on individual parent and child narratives about attention‐seeking behaviour and explores the misalignment between the two. A case study illustrates the reconstruction of the dominant problem‐saturated story through the hungry‐for‐attention metaphor. Finally, the author proposes an integrative approach to combining narrative practices with behavioural interventions for families and professional caregivers.     

Power and Authority in Clinical Practice: A Discourse Analysis Approach to Narrative Process

Issues of power and authority in the treatment relationship are explored using concepts from discourse analysis. Negotiative and heuristic processes of narrative co-construction are described. These concepts, which highlight issues of power and vulnerability in narrative co-construction in ordinary conversation, are then applied to a clinical case. Implications for clinical social work treatment are developed based on an expanded understanding of, and sensitivity to, the sharing of narrative power in the treatment relationship.     

Repositioning mothers: mothers,disabled children and disability studies

In this article we set out to review the ways in which mothers of disabled children have been portrayed within disability studies and the more broader academic literature. We argue that within disability studies mothers of disabled children occupy a liminal position because they are often not disabled and yet they can experience forms of disablism. Their experiences can differ markedly from the experiences of mothers of non‐disabled children and yet the consequences and outcomes of these experiences, such as developing a ‘special competence’ is largely overlooked. Mothers can work to effect change on behalf of their children and, in some cases, for disabled people more generally, however, this role of activist mother is largely undervalued. The review of literature presented here leads us to conclude that further research needs to be undertaken exploring and highlighting the ways in which mothers of disabled children negotiate, manage and approach their daily lives, operating within what are described by feminist scholars as oppressive mothering ideologies and disabling environments.     

Siblinghood through disability studies perspectives: diversifying discourse and knowledge about siblings with and without disabilities

Research about siblings where one has a disability has historically focused on the psychological outcomes of siblings of people with disabilities and has very rarely asked people with disabilities about their sibling relationships. This research focus represents the common individualizing approach and under-representation of people with disabilities that disability studies has argued against. Tracing the history of research about siblings and disability through de/institutionalization and towards current broader theories in disability studies, this article suggests that a range of disability studies perspectives can usefully de-individualize and expand research about siblings where one has a disability. Through examples of how materialist, feminist and inclusive perspectives can be applied to open up research about siblings and disability, the article argues that viewing siblinghood through the range of disability studies perspectives has the potential to expand this research field and represent new facets of siblings’ identities and lives together.     

Video recording children at night in the home

The practicalities and success of an audio-visual recording system developed to document night-time noise and activity in children's bedrooms in an inner-city area are described. The development and use of this method during the study, and potential applications and contexts for its future use are discussed.

We examined children's sleep disturbance due to cough. To date 143 recordings have been made on 41 children. Seven studies (five per cent) were unsuccessful. Three of 70 families declined to take part in the study because of intrusion of privacy. Analysis of the videos took approximately three hours per study.

Home recording at night was practical and successful in households where sleep disturbance due to cough was presented as a problem. Problems that were anticipated with this method of data collection are discussed, and were minimal.     

Facilitated communication,Anna Stubblefield and disability studies

This article discusses the case of Anna Stubblefield, a US disability studies scholar and Professor of Ethics at Rutgers University who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually assaulting a disabled man. Stubblefield claimed that he consented, using facilitated communication. The article argues that facilitated communication is unscientific and unreliable, and that the support for Stubblefield from some disability studies scholars raises serious ethical concerns.     

Comparing housing affordability and quality among disability households: The United States and its regions

Two national data sets (the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Survey of Income and Program Participation) are analyzed to compare housing afford-ability and quality between U.S. disability households and other households and by region. The researchers conclude that disability households in the United States are at risk of inability to afford housing. In addition to higher housing-income ratios, these households are more likely to be older, in poverty, in poor or fair health, and on public assistance than other U.S. households. They are also more likely to carry severe housing cost burdens, to be in housing poverty, and to be receiving housing assistance. Regional differences among disability households and their housing seem to echo geographic economic and population trends, as well as regional variances in the housing stock. The data, which did not address housing accessibility, are less clear about disability households' risks relative to housing quality. Her research interests include housing for special needs populations, community housing needs assessment, and housing policy. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include professional practice and the housing needs of special needs populations, particularly the homeless. He received his Master's degree from California State University at Chico. He is a Housing Extension Specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service. His research interests include environmental issues, housing at-risk populations, and international housing. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University.     

Romanian approach to media portrayals of disability

There is a wide range of media representations of disability, but not just because of the societal stigma. They are a function of norms of journalism as well as biases among people with disabilities themselves. This article is a contribution to the issue of social representation of persons with disabilities from a Romanian perspective, which will help to witness the transformation of the general perception of persons with disabilities by seeing the evolution of the terms used to name disability in crucial years of the socio‐political development of Romania (1989, 1990 and 2003). The existence of different categories of representations will reveal the evolution of society, which switched from a culture of protection to a culture of promotion for people with disabilities.     

The additional cost of disability: a new measure and its application to sensory impairment

This article introduces a method using consensual budget standards to estimate additional costs incurred by households that include disabled people with specified impairments. The article reports on a first application of this to UK single adults with sensory impairments. Using the Minimum Income Standard method, the research aims to identify the cost of disability by working with groups of disabled people to agree what additions to minimum budgets for non-disabled people are required for someone with a given impairment. This provides a more tangible account of the cost of disability than economic analysis of living standards achieved by disabled and non-disabled people, and adds to surveys of actual spending on additional items, which do not account for unmet need. The research on vision and hearing impairment yields new insights into costs arising from the way disabled people live their everyday lives, not just from spending on adaptations and equipment.     

Engaging with materialism and material reality: critical disability studies and economic recession

Critical disability studies has been accused of preoccupation with cultural, lingual and discursive matters, and in doing so failing to adequately engage with the often-harsh material reality of disability. This has contributed to a circumstance in which disability studies has produced a lack of material focused directly upon economic processes. Concurrently, disabled people have encountered a momentous economic recession that has threatened their basic economic and human rights. This article seeks to address what is evidently a gap in the burgeoning critical disability and disability studies literature. That is, a gap largely uninhabited by attempts to apply a critical disability studies perspective to macro-economic processes. The article focuses predominantly on two facets of critical disability studies as identified by Goodley: the self and other, and intersectionality. The article concludes that critical disability studies has much to offer through the production of new understandings of economic processes.     

Disrupting global disability frameworks: settler-colonialism and the geopolitics of disability in Palestine/Israel

In recent years, Israel has seen an increase in disability studies scholarship and disability rights activism. At the same time, critical disability studies scholars have begun calling attention to the role of colonization and neocolonial powers, too often obscured in disability studies work, in disabling oppressed nations. This article brings these critiques in conversation with disability studies scholarship regarding Occupied Palestine to argue that disability is inextricably intertwined with the settler-colonial project of the Israeli state. By highlighting the geopolitical production of disablement, this work suggests that social approaches to disability have largely effaced disability injustice rooted in geopolitical power imbalances.     

A Narrative Approach to Groups

This paper considers the ways that narratives can be used in groups to create meaning, organize the past, explain the present and consider alternatives for the future. Narratives are formats for self-creation; they can also be used to provide support or education, promote self-understanding and interpersonal effectiveness. Already familiar in self-help groups and reminiscence groups for the elderly, narrative approaches can be useful in many other formats. In this paper I discuss ways of eliciting narratives, understanding their meaning from many perspectives and using them to promote growth and healing in groups. The group leader's role is reconfigured into that of participant observer and manager of the group process. It is up to the leader to provide a context in which multiple accounts can emerge for consideration.     

Narrative transformation in child abuse reporting

This paper examines how a case of child abuse is turned into ‘political news’. It raises the following questions: (i) which moments in the chain of events concerning child abuse are selected for coverage by the media; (ii) what is the nature of the transformation of institutional events into a particular type of covered event; and (iii) what is the dynamics of struggle over definitions of reality and the projection of certain causal links. We compare how the trade press and the national press report child abuse by concentrating on three different cycles of a particular case, Stephanie Fox (cycle 1: discovery of Stephanie's death; cycle 2: the conviction of Stephen Fox; and cycle 3: the inquiry report). Our primary focus is on the narrative transformation of the storyline as different voices and discourses are recruited to substantiate different agendas. We show how different rhetorical strategies are deployed to account for the facts of the case, while linking this up with the current situation of the reader of such media reports. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.