Brian Woods

A Short History of Powered Wheelchairs

This article recounts some early findings on a history of powered wheelchairs in the 20th century from an analysis of archival materials, oral accounts, and secondary sources. The primary goal of this article is not to provide the definitive history of powered wheelchairs, but rather to further our understanding of wheelchair innovation through a historical analysis. The paper sheds light on some of the richness and complexities involved in powered wheelchair innovation, highlights the nonlinearity of that process, and explores the roles of and the relationships between social and technological change. Although it is evident that powered mobility has revolutionized die life experiences of many disabled people, enabling independence, social interaction, and even the facilitation of socio-psychological development, few have charted the social and technological topography that brought this revolutionary change about. In partially mapping the history of powered wheelchairs, this paper draws attention to the idea that wheelchairs are not simply technical devices, but also social and political machines entwined with socio-political conditions and expectations.

Food allergy and food intolerance: towards a sociological agenda.

This article asks what sociological insights an analysis of food allergy and food intolerance might afford. We outline the parameters of debates around food allergy and food intolerance in the immunological, clinical and epidemiological literatures in order to identify analytic strands which might illuminate our sociological understanding of the supposed increase in both. Food allergy and food intolerance are contested and contingent terms and it is salient that the term true food allergy is replete throughout medico-scientific, epidemiological and popular discourses in order to rebuff spurious or ‘nonallergic’ claims of food-related symptoms. Complexity theory is introduced as a means of gaining analytic purchase on the food allergy debate. The article concludes that the use of this perspective provides a contemporary example of the ‘double hermeneutic’, in that the meanings and interpretations of contemporary explanations of food allergy are both permeated by, and can be made sense of, through recourse to complexity thinking.

Experiencing Food Allergy and Food Intolerance An Analysis of Lay Accounts

This article offers an analysis of 28 lay accounts of the experience of living with either food allergy or food intolerance in England. We structure the presentation of our data in terms of Mike Bury’s three types of narrative form — contingent, moral and core. We suggest that people with food allergies at risk of acute, severe and potentially fatal symptoms on exposure to allergens find their condition to be less socially problematic than do those who suffer intolerances to certain foods, which can result in chronic, but not life-threatening, symptoms. Drawing on the extant literatures on the sociology of food and eating we propose a conceptualization in relation to notions of identity, anomie and communality that attempts to make sense of this finding.

No Wheelchairs Beyond this Point: A Historical Examination of Wheelchair Access in the Twentieth Century in Britain and America

On the surface, the wheelchair appears a simple machine: its function seemingly apparent and its workings relatively uncomplicated. Yet, despite this apparent simplicity, the wheelchair is a complex artefact imbued with a myriad of social as well as technical relations that act simultaneously to exclude and include, confine and liberate, shape and be shaped. The wheelchairs inextricable links to injury and illness have certainly shaped its definition as a medical device. Such a definition has labelled the occupier as passive or ill and shaped a wider understanding of the machine as a prison. Wheelchair users, however, perceive the machine as a means to independence: it enables rather than disables. We present evidence here to suggest that this is not a recent phenomenon as we show how wheelchair access has been on the political agenda for disabled people for most of the twentieth century. The paper also examines the role of the wheelchair in the development of this movement, and we suggest that, as the design of the wheelchair improved, so the demand for better access increased. The final section of the paper looks at how poorly the state and its agents understood the issue of access.

Access, Agency and Normality: the Wheelchair and the Internet as Mediators of Disability

Since the late 1970s, the recognition that disability is a matter of politics rather than simply a ‘problem’ of medicine has gained much ground. Similarly, the idea that technology is a political rather than a neutral tool also grew over much the same period (Pinch and Bijker, 1984; Winner, 1980). Yet, despite both engaging with important questions about patterns of power, authority and the human experience, these two fields of study have largely remained separate. In an endeavour to bring them together, this chapter, based on two projects from the IHT Programme, will draw an analogy between wheelchairs and Internet technologies to explore issues of access, control and the autonomy of disabled people. While these are two very different technologies, and the authors bring two very different styles of analysis to bear on the problems, the common thread that ties the two together is that both Internet and wheelchair technologies are sites of political conflict.