David Bolt

From blindness to visual impairment: terminological typology and the Social Model of Disability

The Social Model of Disability holds that persons are impaired for a number of reasons, but that it is only by society that they are disabled. As a product of that disabling society and a key component in psychocultural representation, it is terminology on which the paper focuses. Consisting of ableism, disablement and impairment, a tripartite typology is proposed, the first phase of which is rendered outmoded, the second regressive and the third progressive. This hierarchical categorisation provides a basis for the suggestion that terminology like blindness and the blind might be rejected in favour of that which denotes only visual impairment, the progressive terminology that corresponds with insights gained from the Social Model of Disability.

DISABILITY AND THE RHETORIC OF INCLUSIVE HIGHER EDUCATION

The social model of disability states that many persons have many impairments, but that it is only by the ableist society in which they live that they are disabled. In considering just how inclusive Higher Education is for said persons, this short paper proposes a long‐overdue modernization of the ableist way in which undergraduates are taught. As a traditional gold standard university subject, direct reference is made to the study of English, but the conclusion will be pertinent to other disciplines. Similarly, though the paper cites the case of persons with impaired vision, the findings will be relevant to deaf people and to persons who are disabled in general.

Terminology and the psychosocial burden of blindness

Various denotations and connotations of the word ‘blindness’ are examined and the inference is drawn that they constitute a psychosocial burden that perpetuates prejudice. The analysis leads on to a hypothesis in which a more progressive terminology could lead to reduction of this burden.

Looking Back at Literature: A Critical Reading of the Unseen Stare in Depictions of People with Impaired Vision

Considering the Unseen Starer and Unseeing Victim in a sample of Anglophone literature, the paper focuses on the privileging of a perspective that is dominated by vision, the ocularcentrism that defines people with impaired vision as epistemologically and even ontologically inferior to people with unimpaired vision. The underpinning assumption of authority is explained in terms of panopticism, whereby the presence or even the notion of an Unseen Starer affects control over the Unseeing Victim. This scenario is problematical due to the hegemonic capacity of literary representation, because, if not considered critically, literature itself becomes something of a panopticon, influencing attitudes both of and towards people with impaired vision.

Cultural Disability Studies in Education: Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide

Over the last few decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In this book the three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and knowledge to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes to narrative and characterisation. Moving from late nineteenth to early twenty-first-century representations, this book combines disability studies with aesthetics, film studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, happiness studies, popular music studies, humour studies, and media studies. In so doing it encourages discussion around representations of disability in drama, novels, films, autobiography, short stories, music videos, sitcoms, and advertising campaigns. Discussions are underpinned by the tripartite model of disability and so disrupt one-dimensional representations. Cultural Disability Studies in Education encourages educators and students to engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience that merits multiple levels of representation and offers true potential for a non-normative social aesthetic. It will be required reading for all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural disability studies, Disability Studies in Education, sociology, and cultural studies.