The Anti-Social Model of Disability

Guy Dewsbury & Mark Rouncefield Department of Computing, Lancaster University

The Social Model of Disability

Oliver It does not deny the problem of disability but locates it squarely within society. Different kinds of social model - materialist & idealist - Priestley The social model and practice Standard critiques of the social model - critiques from within

Examining the Social Model of Disability

Critique based on the question what work does it do? The social model as a form of political rhetoric The social model as sociological theory The social model and research methods The social model and design

The Social Model as political rhetoric

Undoubtedly successful in re-focusing debate egs redefining disability in terms of a disabling environment, repositioning disabled people as citizens with rights, and reconfiguring the responsibilities for creating, sustaining and overcoming disablism But - you dont need the social model to know that getting up steps in a wheelchair is difficult.

The Social Model as Sociology

The radical claims of the social model The problems of constructionist models The disappearance of the phenomena - its life Jim but not as we know it The disabled as cultural dopes - priveliging academic accounts The problems of explanatory theories - designed to resolve sociological problems not real problems Moving from correspondence to congruence views of reality; from social life as fact to social life as achievement - ethnomethodology

The Social Model & Research Methods

The emancipatory paradigm - links with feminist research who can do research? - carving out research territory - standard academic practice Ethnomethodological responses
indifference - versions - the disabled as practical sociologists the demise of the native - culture as achieved the disabled as practical enquirers into culture

The Social Model & Design

Increasing importance of social factors in design - in requirements, sensitivities etc What do we get in the way of requirements, sensitivities etc from the social model?? social model misses the real world, real time practices of the disabled Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography as input to design

Close encounters with difficult words: ethnomethodologically informed ethnography

any group of persons - prisoners, primitives, pilots or patients -

develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it, and .. a good way to learn about any of these worlds is to submit oneself in the company of the members to the daily round of petty contingencies to which they are subject. (Goffman, 1961: ix)

a naturalistic method - emphasis on describing the social activities of work - 'don't think but look what is a days activity like?how do activities get done?

Ethnomethodology
to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical .. reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seeks to learn about them as phenomena in their own right (Garfinkel 1967)

Ethnomethodology = data driven Sociology - an unmotivated approach to witnessable and varied activities . Ethnomethodological findings - descriptions of the embodied social practices in and through which members produce and accomplish the daily activities of the setting Equator Digital Care project

Websites
DIRC http://www.dirc.org.uk/ - Ubiquitous Computing and the Home EQUATOR http://www.equator.ac.uk - the Digital Care Project Smart Thinking http://www.gdewsbury.ukideas.com/ Fieldwork Methods http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/Fieldwork /Tutout.html