Enacting disability : how can STS inform disability studies

• This paper aims to discuss how science and technology studies (STS) can inform disability studies and challenge dominant approaches, such as the medical and the social models, in the ordering and representation of disability. Disability studies and STS have followed somewhat parallel paths in the history of ideas. From a positivist approach to their research objects to a strong social constructivism, both disciplines have moved to post-modern conceptualisations of science, technology and disability. In the same manner and challenging the extremes of modernism (either ordering disability as a bodily impairment or locating disability solely in society), this paper brings the conceptual vocabulary of actor-network theory (ANT) to the field of disability studies. ANT enables the ordering of disability as a simultaneous biological, material and semiotic phenomenon. Exchanges of performative agency between these elements determine the disability experience. The focus of the analysis shifts from merely defining disability as an impairment, handicap, or social construction (epistemology) to how disability is experienced and enacted in everyday practices, in policy-making, in socio-technical arenas, in the body, and in the built environment (ontology). This adoption of an ontological approach to disability allows the analysis to not only discuss how disability is done, but also to follow how disability groups and carriers of disability expertise and experience intervene in policy-making by developing ‘research in the wild’ and confronting scientific experts in different fora (ontological politics).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Övrig annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialt arbete (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Work (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

actor-network theory

agency

postmodernism

experience of disability

social constructivism

medical model

social model

research in the wild

hybrid forums

Technology and social change

Teknik och social förändring

Disability research

Handikappsforskning

Sociology

Sociologi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)