ON BECOMING DISABLED AND ARTICULATING ALTERNATIVES

Abstract

The topic of this article is the ordering of disability. The question is how people become, and are made, disabled. This is linked with a further question about how to investigate and represent differences such as those between ability and disability. How can studies that aim to contribute to opening up and remaking the conditions of possibility for disability avoid reproducing the same differences and distributions of power and agency? Indeed, disability studies have contributed to denaturalizing ability as well as disability. Many of these studies owe much to genealogical approaches focusing on the descent, regulation, and generative power of discourse. But then the problematic inference is drawn that this discourse imposes itself to order how people perceive and think, materializes in bodies and practices, and does so in a coherent manner. The objective in this article is to pursue a different approach that investigates ordering in practice, brings out the existing alternatives and explores the possibilities for articulating these. For this endeavour, the author mobilizes a specific strand of Foucauldian work and reworkings of it in science and technology studies. Drawing on a study of life after road traffic accidents in Norway, this article explores the following: how disability becomes enacted in everyday practices; the character of the modes of ordering that emerge in these practices; how this ordering is achieved; and the nature of the relations and interferences between these ways of becoming disabled. The argument is that in practice people slip and move between multiple modes of ordering that co-exist, are partially related in complex ways, and even folded into each other. Finally, the article considers the relation between openness and multiplicity – and their study – in view of possibilities for articulating alternatives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 181 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.