Between art therapy and disability aesthetics: a sociological approach for understanding the intersection between art practice and disability discourse

What emerges as art and how it is categorised are parts of a collective process taking place in art worlds and involving a wide array of social actors. In this article, the relation between four ways of framing the intersection of disability and art is discussed. These frames are art therapy, outsider art, disability art, and disability aesthetics. The article suggests the frames and the way they relate to each other as important discourses in organising the relation between disability and art. The discourses’ relevance is demonstrated by discussing three cases of art practice among disabled people. The discussion of the cases demonstrates the importance of including more than one of the four identified discourses when analysing art practice involving disability. The concluding part discusses how the intersections of disability and art can be more closely linked to the mainstream art world through the concept of social practice art.     

Disability in British poetry of the First World War

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen. This iconic trench poet of the First World War was accused of portraying his impaired veteran as a tragic victim of loss. However, 50?years before the modern disability movement, Owen lacked the language to interpret impairment as oppression. What ‘Disabled’ requires is a contextual analysis that integrates its literary qualities with the historical conditions. This article applies such an approach. Firstly, the technical devices used to tell the story are examined: for example, rhyming, verse structure and allusions. Secondly, the experience of impairment represented in the poem is related to early-twentieth-century British society: in particular to the initial patriotic enthusiasm for the War, to the influence of gender roles and to the limitations of state provision. In this way, we see how Owen’s literary image is situated within a historical time frame.     

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.     

Mediating claims to artistry: Social stratification in a local visual arts community

Participant observation was employed to analyze the stratification of artists in the visual art world around a small northeastern American city. Reflecting their art world reputation, artists' strata included naifs, hobbyists, serious amateurs, aspiring preprofessionals, and professionals. The local careers of some artists moved progressively from lower to higher reaches of the system; as they moved upward, their level of professional commitment, art world involvement, knowledge of art, skill, and artistic style tended to change also. Except among professionals, the great majority were women. Overall, certain art styles were selectively favored. The most important selective mechanisms were formal art education, professionalization, artistic style, network centrality, jurying, and sales. With a few recent exceptions, truly naive and imitative traditional styles were excluded from the upper levels in favor of modernist abstraction, innovative figuration, or sophisticated forms ofart brut.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 12th World Congress of Sociology, International Sociological Association, Madrid, July 1990.     

Participatory video analysis in disability research

This article sets out critical framing as an analytical approach in participatory video by which people investigate and analyze a topic through arts-based engagement, storyboarding, and collaborative editing. Participatory video as an action research method in self-advocacy has been discussed elsewhere. Here, the author examines critical framing and the role of generative themes in participatory analysis by describing a case study in which adults with developmental disabilities explored the dimensions of sexual health through participatory video. The author proposes that critical framing provides a more nuanced approach to participatory analysis. Credibility and trustworthiness with data triangulation and overall findings are also described.     

(Micro)mobility,disability and resilience: exploring well-being among youth with physical disabilities

This paper explores the daily (micro)mobilities that youth with a visual or auditory impairment use to sustain well-being. Geographical research suggests that mobility is a universal phenomenon referred to the capacity to navigate one’s way through different spaces and places. Using a qualitative cross-cultural, visual methods approach to research with vulnerable youth, including four participants with visual or auditory impairments, we demonstrate that everyday patterns of (micro)mobilities through the youth’s home, school and community help disabled youth create pathways to resilience. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to services that promote resilience against ableist beliefs.     

Education of people with disabilities: a capability-context framework of culture

People with disabilities find themselves at the margins of ideas on education in the rights-based and the agency-focused frameworks (the capability approach). This article socially situates the rights-based framework to extend agency as an educational opportunity to make it participatory in cross-cultural contexts, and individually locates the agency-focused framework to enhance agency as multi-dimensional educational experience-outcome journeys across cultural contexts. This extended scope of rights and enhanced capacity of agency is advanced as the capability-context framework of culture. The framework focuses on analytically distinct yet connected emerging agents with capabilities of both dialogical discourses (retrospective reflexivity – macro-mechanisms) and dialectic narratives (bounded participation – micro-structures), which can provide access to deep social structures, and their many ways of being (micro-mechanisms) and specific ways of doing (macro-structures) that enable, but also disable the social choices of people with disabilities, to open new possibilities for them, and for all across contexts.     

Rights discourses in relation to education of people with intellectual disability: towards an ethics of care that enables participation

In this paper we argue that human rights approaches for intellectually disabled people have failed to recognise the complexity of rights claims made by and on behalf of this group. Drawing on a research project into discourses of education for intellectually disabled people in the Eastern Cape, South Africa we discern three rights discourses; namely, rights to full participation, rights to special services and rights to protection. These draw off a social model, a medical model and a protective model, respectively. We note that these discourses may be set up in contestation with each other. However, we argue that they can be seen as complementary if viewed within an ethics of care that enables participation. Within this conceptualisation, participation is viewed within relations of care but is subject to a critique that examines the role of context and disciplinary power in constructing dependency.     

From leprosy to The Willow Tree: decoding disability and Islamic spirituality in Iranian film

The lack of attention in academic discourse to representations of disability in films from the Middle East has led to an incomplete picture of representations of disability in global cinema. For instance, the diverse meanings of disability in Iranian cinema and the influence of disability on the emergence of Iranian New Wave cinema have been almost completely ignored by scholars. A number of award-winning films from Iran have featured disability as central to their narratives – such as The House is Black (1963), Taste of Cherry (1997), The Color of Paradise (1999), The Willow Tree (2005), and The Painting Pool (2013). Disability in these films serves alternatively as a symbol of spiritual possibility, a mark of marginalization, and a covert social critique. These films examine the emotional, physical, and social implications of disability, while celebrating the cultural power of film to challenge social, religious, and artistic barriers.     

Embodying and enacting disability as siblings: experiencing disability in relationships between young adult siblings with and without disabilities

Abstract

Where one sibling has a disability, research has examined the role of disability in sibling relationships; however, the majority has reflected a normative understanding of sibling relationships and a deficit understanding of disability. Reacting to this history, this paper draws on the concepts of embodiment (absorption of bodily experience into self/identity) and enactment (performance of self/identity) to provide a new way of understanding the role of disability in sibling relationships. Using data from an Australian study of young adult siblings with and without disabilities, the paper discusses how disability is embodied and enacted in: how siblings engage in supportive and conflictual talk and everyday chat with each other; how they enact recreation and seek connection with each other; and how they strive to understand and experience their emotions about each other. The paper ends by discussing how embodiment and enactment allow a clearer understanding of disability in sibling relationships, which may be empowering for siblings.     

Explanatory models for disability: perspectives of health providers working in Malawi

Health providers’ understanding of disability determines how disabled people are treated, and hence it is imperative to address conceptualisations of disability, as this will contribute to better opportunities and realisation of human rights for disabled people. This article will use data from a qualitative study exploring conceptualisations of disability by 22 health service providers from the total health care system in Malawi, including the professional sector (e.g. medical doctors and nurses) and the folk sector (healers and indigenous practices). We will discuss how these perceptions influence the lives of disabled people, using the case of a health service user with physical and speech impairment as an example. Our data show that health providers largely conceptualise disability according to the medical model for disability, contributing to the exclusion of disabled people. The bio-psycho-social model for disability, largely absent as an explanatory model for disability among our informants, is the most inclusive and rights based.     

Oscar Pistorius: disability discourses in homosexual forums

This article performs textual analysis of discourse on Oscar Pistorius that appears on the homosexual discussion forums DataLounge and JustUsBoys. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ discourses – divided by Pistorius’s 2013 fatal shooting of his girlfriend – read Pistorius and his crime along sexuality and disability lines. I argue that it is worthwhile analysing how disability is constructed from different positions of marginalisation, especially when this at times yields discriminatory narratives. Pistorius, his disability, and his infamy are read by a community that itself exists outside the realm of mainstream debate, offering insight into disability and (homo)sexuality, adding greater dimension to ‘intersectional’ approaches to both.     

Doing disability research in a Southern context: challenges and possibilities

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project (DEPP) aims at exploring the role of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poverty. A central focus of the research is to engage with the young people with disabilities themselves and to understand how they construed their lives and experiences. This paper discusses three issues which are of central concern to the project: identification of the sample group, appropriateness of the research methods and, finally, an examination of the assumptions underpinning the research process.     

Missing discourses: concepts of joy and happiness in disability

This paper analyses a series of representations of disability and rehabilitation taken from research and policy settings in Australia. The purpose of the analysis is to (a) identify the presence or absence of discourses of happiness and joy in the contexts analysed and (b) to analyse the various treatments and interpretations of happiness and joy that are present. Through this analysis we show that while official professional and public discourses on disability and rehabilitation exhibit predominantly negative discursive patterns and features (i.e. aspirations to achieve ‘normality’ and a negative lexicon, such as disability, coping, rehabilitation, burden, abnormality, etc.) there are many other potentially positive and empowering discursive and narrative patterns and features that remain hidden beneath negatively oriented ways of seeing, being, acting and describing in academic, policy and practice settings. We argue that policy‐makers and academics alike need to be sensitive to the dynamics of discourse when constructing research and developing policy.     

Pity and pragmatism: understandings of disability in northeast Thailand

Cultural models of illness causation and treatment inform community understandings of and responses to disability. Data collected as part of a multi‐country study, conducted in 2002–2007, illustrate how villagers from northeastern Thailand conceptualise disability (pikarn). Local understandings of causality are shaped by Buddhist beliefs in accumulated demerit, and this significantly influences attitudes towards illness, adversity and bodily states. Buddhist notions of love and compassion (metta and kurana) inform appropriate responses to people living with disabilities, while local distinctions of ability and disability inform expressions of sympathy and/or pity (songsarn), with implications for the social participation of people with a disability.     

Mainstreaming disability in policies: the Flemish experience

Although research on gender mainstreaming (GM) is extensive, literature on disability mainstreaming (DM) is scarce. This article builds on the experience of GM to explore the conditions affecting DM, focusing on the first Flemish policy cycle of DM (2010–2014) in two policy domains: employment and education. We found no substantive difference in the conditions necessary for the successful implementation of DM compared with that of GM. Also, developments specific to the policy domains had more influence on the inclusive character of policies than did the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities or the Flemish approach to DM.     

Exploring how the social model of disability can be re-invigorated: in response to Mike Oliver

In his 2013 article in Disability & Society, Oliver recommended that the social model should either be replaced or re-invigorated. I argue here that the social model’s current emphasis reflects the social conditions in which it was introduced, and that the model’s impact on disabled people’s lives would increase if its emphasis was to more accurately reflect the current social conditions in the geographical regions in which it is applied. In order to help foster its re-invigoration, I ask five questions for discussion on the way forward for the social model. I identified my questions through examining published writing on the scope of the social model and on the model’s relationship with other models of disability.     

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.     

In search of disability: a critical discourse analysis of a Key Stage 1 guided reading scheme

This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine the representation of disability in the children’s Oxford Reading Tree Series Read with Biff, Chip and Kipper. The representation is found to influence self-identity and social attitudes towards disability, for it grants ‘normalcy’ a status of idolatry. Such elevation of normalcy elicits ‘normate’ culture, which, in turn, can generate ‘aesthetic nervousness’. This hegemonic tradition therefore produces a replicative process that is consequential to the production of future texts, social justice and an inclusive society.