DISABILITIES
Why does the general culture usually associates disability with defectiveness, insufficiency, and imperfection? The multiple realities of multiple disabilities. Variety of medical and legal classifications. Ability simply to access the media.
What is the limit who permits a definition of adults too dependent and non contributing to be parties to the social contract? No broadcast/publicity for the disability arts movement (film festivals). How could we achieve a commitment to inclusiveness?
In following a broader significance of difference, how can we question the preeminence assigned to normalcy, and the concomitant devaluation of the physical and cognitive conditions considered to be disabilities? Absence of impairment-specific programs.
No use of disabled actors and performers. Who is really listening to the real histories of individuals with disabilities and who is reading the representations of disabled people as they appear in literature, cinema, and similar creative work?
Absence of sign language interpretation. Why is it so little reporting about the lives of individuals with physical, cognitive, or psychological impairments? Isolation strategies and non-declaration of the impairment. Identity-loss and segregation.
Is our knowledge shaped by the condition of our body as well as by social conditions? Can we therefore expect that people with disabilities, whose bodies diverge from the species-typical kind, sometimes will develop specific cognitive approaches and abilities that differ from most other people’s? Do disabled people have particular gifts?
In what ways disability, deformity and illness have appeared to defy application of familiar theoretical presumptions and practices in history? The case of Huntington’s disease. Typology beyond the physical/mental handicap.
How is it to explain that in so many cultures blind individuals, who can distinguish objects by echolocation, are considered to be endowed with legendary skills for remembering and transmitting the spoken word accurately and with heightened understanding of orally transmitted texts?
Underestimated sources of handicap (on psychiatry and rheumatology). The importance and nature of Social Handicap. Do individuals with Down Syndrome, who think abstractly only with difficulty or not at all, sometimes have greater than usual skills in perceiving and remembering the concrete details of what they see or hear?
Allocations for invalidity and the economy of handicap. Do people with Williams Syndrome quite often have greater social and emotional intelligence than is species-typical for humans, as well as unusual musical facility? The vicious cycle of stigma creation. Wrongness of equations (dyslexia-stupidity).
Is there an innovative insightfulness and creativity achieved by individuals with diagnoses of various kinds of psychoses and similar so-called mental disabilities, conditions experienced by many famed artists, writers and musicians? Preventing handicap: Work accidents / Sport and traffic accidents that account for 90% of handicaps.
In how many ways people whose cognitive anomalies impede them from arriving at and articulating complex and rationalized accounts of their own good very often are not accorded full status, and sometimes even are denied considerability? Media representation of Disabled People: false, negative image and stereotypes for people with language and learning impairments, mental health and learning disabilities.
In which ways disabled people as a group have been dismissed and displaced, condemned for not complying with biological or social paradigms and therefore denied authorization for the ways of knowing that inform their own experiences? Aging as a cause of handicap; possible prevention.
Was biological determinism a potent tool used to oppress disabled people through false testimony that science found them to be less capable of survival? Visceral and general deficiencies, such as those resulting from cancer or cardiac or respiratory insufficiency. Polyhandicap /Plurihandicap / Overhandicap.
Is the fact of characterizing standpoints with reference to biological differences inherently and onerously deterministic, so that one’s body inescapably delineates one’s cognitive destiny? Defining intellectual deficiencies. Is the IQ test sufficient? Dyscalculation, dyspraxia and other cognitive functions.
How to classify psychological deficiencies: autism, schizophrenia, compulsive-obsessive troubles. Is it possible that acknowledging the range of atypical ways of knowing reveal a heretofore unimagined richness in what humans can know the world is like?
Paraplegia, tetraplegia and their causes. Myopathy and neuromuscular diseases of genetic origin. Sensorial handicaps. Their impressive frequency. What is the importance of the interplay of biological and social identities – whether these be innate, imposed, or embraced in disability studies and disability identity?
Is there anyone that can claim to be, or speak as or about, the typical disabled person? Doesn’t the enormous diversity among disabled people, and the importance of reflecting all their differences in formulating disability theory, call for sensitivity to nuance and context? Is it true that a large number of us should expect to become disabled later in our lives?
Is disability a permeable classification? What are the differences between people who have lived at length or lifelong with disability, the ones who are newly so, and others who have lived through periods in which they were disabled but now are not so?
Doesn’t disability affect the identities of far more many people beyond the 600 million worldwide who are themselves disabled? What are the dangers of acquiring eligibility for assuming the « sick » role and thereby being relieved of various productivity and related expectations and responsibilities?
Disability and the importance of arts. How is it possible to seriously challenge stigmatization, exploitation, and exclusion based on disability? Why do disabled people shrink into invisibility?
Do women with disabilities encounter opposition to their maintaining fertility, or accessing reproductive medical technology in achieving fertility, or even retaining custody of the children to which they have given birth? Disability and sports.
Disabled bullying. Does society improperly burden people whose limitations she cannot directly see, and is not sufficiently knowledgeable to appreciate, by constantly challenging them to prove their disabilities?
Discrimination of the disabled in the workplace. How could we recalibrate our sensibilities to honor the evidence of other people’s senses, especially of their own embodiment? How has the history of medicine addressed disabled people? Is it a history of the repression and rejection of bodies and minds that diverge from the supposed paradigm or norm?
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