Tanya Titchkosky

Disability in the news: a reconsideration of reading

By making use of a disability studies perspective informed by phenomenology, this paper interrogates the social process of reading news articles that depict disability as if it is only limit. The paper begins from my experience of reading an article that assumes reader‐willingness to imagine disability as a kind of limit without possibility, without life. I go on to consider how the meaning of disability is actually produced by normative forms of cultural perception that recognize certain bodies as a kind of negation. Reading, a common mode of perception within literate western cultures, is used to problematize how mainstream media configures embodiment. Finally, the paper raises the ever present possibility that the ways in which impaired bodies are typically limited may contain the possibility of alternatives that disturb and re‐make the everyday modes of perceiving disability.

The Ends of the Body as Pedagogic Possibility

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The Body as the Problem of Individuality: A Phenomenological Disability Studies Approach

Disability, as Paul Abberley (1998: 93) reminds us, is interesting often only as a problem. Or as Bill Hughes (2007: 673) puts it, ‘almost by definition, [we] assume disability to be ontologically problematic, and many disabled people feel that many of the people with whom they interact in everyday situations treat them as if they are invisible, repulsive or “not all there”’. What interests us from a phenomenological perspective is that the contemporary scene of disability framed as ‘problem’ typically generates the requirement for explanation and amelioration, but little else. Thus, this chapter examines the hegemonic taken-for-granted character of the disability-as-a-problem frame.

Disability images and the art of theorizing normality

This paper addresses the power of images of disability as a way to examine how such images can be read as reproducing normality. By image of disability, I mean any appearance of disability made through the social act of interpretation. In this paper, I conduct an interpretive sociological analysis of common and even mundane everyday images of disability, including the universal icon for access. I aim to demonstrate the necessary ‘art’ of theorizing the connection between images of disability and the reproduction of normality. I call this pursuit an art since through theorizing how and why disability appears as it does in everyday life we can create a livelier, provocative, and perhaps deliberately different image of disability. This paper, then, makes normality something to wonder about by theorizing familiar disability images that are already part of Western collective existence.

WHO's MIND, whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHOs publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanons call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.

The Anguish of Power: Remapping Mental Diversity with an Anticolonial Compass

An analysis informed by anticolonial principles “challenges the normalizing gaze of the dominant in the construction of what constitutes valid knowledge and experience.” (Kempf, 2009). This chapter aims to participate in this challenge by exposing how, at the level of embodiment, colonization has worked to oppress diversity and to make the possibility of valued bodily, sensorial, and mental differences all but disappear. By embodiment we mean the kinds of social and political relations that are established with bodies, minds, and senses. In particular, this chapter explores “mental health” discourse as produced and distributed by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO has been instrumental in exporting a particular version of mental health issues around the world and this has real consequences for how people, as well as “developing countries,” come to be understood and treated. We cast our attention on how mental differences and anguish are framed by the normalizing gaze of this dominant health agency. Along with anticolonial principles, our analysis also draws on a disability studies perspective. Such a perspective understands disability as a social matter requiring inquiry and does not understand it as an individual matter in need of only cure or care. Our perspective locates disability in the midst of physical and cultural environments and does not reproduce the belief that disability is simply in impaired bodies. From a disability studies perspective, then, disability is a complex interpretive issue that resides between people and should, thus, be studied as such. Combining anticolonial principles with a disability studies perspective allows us to focus our inquiry on WHO’s constitution of the category “mental health and illness” so as to reveal its power to organize and manage how colonized people can and cannot be known. Let us say a few words on what this chapter will not do. We do not argue that mental illness is, or is not, a myth; nor do we tell a more complex etiology to justify the power of WHO’s mental health initiatives; nor do we try to uncover what might really be going on in people’s lives behind the labels of, for example, “depression,” “schizophrenia,” or “drug use.” Our aim, in contrast, is to engage the ways Chapter 9 The Anguish of Power: Remapping Mental Diversity with an Anticolonial Compass

Hawking incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the anthropology of the knowing subject

Hawking Incorporated is steadfast in its commitment to the application of principles of actor network theory. Hélène Mialet expertly meets her aim to reveal the complex network of embodied actors and their competencies as they work to constitute the myth of the disembodied lone genius. The genius in question is Stephen Hawking – Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and probably one of the most famous physicists in recent times. Hawking has already been cast into documentaries (Chapter IV), newspapers, magazines and books (Chapters I–III), and immortalized in statue form (Chapter VII) situated outside his Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Mialet examines all of these venues as well as the people active within them as they produce the figure known as Hawking. Mialet’s ethnographic research, beginning in 1998, culminates in various descriptions of how those ‘working toward the goal of reproducing the unique Hawking’ (41) do so. She describes the complexity of the hard work done by graduate students and research assistants, nurses, wives, secretaries and colleagues, as well as by the popular media and the university archive, as they work alongside computer technology and the ever-present wheelchair. Mialet reveals the dynamic networks of human and non-human competencies constituting the scientist. The reader is shown the oriented concerted action of people, as well as technology, serving to produce Hawking as the ‘mythical figure of the lone genius’ (2), able to transcend ‘political, social, and cultural spaces’ (3), while signifying the typically unquestioned values of ‘solitude, pure mind, intelligence beyond reach, the force of reason’ (5). With extraordinary detail, Mialet re-incorporates Hawking and places his body where all bodies are lived; namely, in the midst of and in relation to other embodied beings. Still, Hawking Incorporated, writes Mialet: