Foley, A., & Ferri, B. A. (2012). Technology for people, not disabilities: Ensuring access and inclusion. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 12(4), 192–200.

Note: All pull quotes below are from this paper. The additional comments and questions are my own, unless otherwise attributed

Salient Details

Premise:

Technology is not neutral. Its design and use can carry forward social norms and values that perpetuate or compound normalized ableist views, and create unexpected and under-critiqued forms of social exclusion for disabled people.

Purpose:

The purpose of the article is to question the premise that it is reasonable to require disabled learners and technology users to need assistive technology to engage with technology. Further to that, it problematizes a number of the conceptions at the heart of inclusion and accessibility and offers some avenues to explore how accessible technologies could promote access, flexibility and inclusion.

Conceptual Framework:

  • Social model of disability
  • Cites disability rights activists but their argument feels rooted in a disability justice POV
  • disability-informed theory of dismodernism

Methods:

Literature review and normative argument

My Notes With Quotes:

Communication technologies and new media promise to ‘revolutionize our lives’ by breaking down barriers (Goggin and Newell, 2003, p. 13) and expanding access for disabled people1 (Ellis and Kent, 2011, p. 2). Technology is often characterised as liberating – making up for social, educational and physical barriers to full participation in society. Often viewed in very utopian ways, technology promises to liberate us from the confines of embodiment and provide us with a futuristic antidote for impairment. Through technological advancements, disability would simply fade away or become a largely inconsequential difference.

Observation: This introduction troubles the naive belief that we can overcome the disabling designs and practices of the built world in a utopian digital world and immediately points out the underlying ableist assumptions that are encoded in the the way technology is designed and used.

As Davis (2005) in his book Enforcing Normalcy argues, although we might perceive a particular mode of communication as normal or natural, ‘like all signifying practices, [it] is not natural but based on sets of assumptions about the body, about reality, and of course about power (p. 16). Thus, because technology is very much a part of the larger social context, such normative assumptions about how bodies are supposed to operate are deeply embedded in all aspects of technology. Moreover, these ideologies of ability and normalcy are so ‘imbricated . . . in our thinking and practices’, that we often fail to notice their ‘patterns, authority, contradictions, and influence’ (Siebers, 2008, p. 9).

Observation: Speaks to the insidious, unexamined power and privilege of the able POV

…the norms in on-line contexts often mirror (and even exaggerate) the norms of everyday society.

Observation: Why would we assume we could do better without a reckoning?

…virtual worlds continue to privilege the able body by conforming to the social realities and norms of the non-virtual world. In fact, the reproduction of the non-virtual world into the virtual world highlights the ways that normalcy and able-bodiedness operate as a compulsory system of identity that must be replicated, despite its inevitable impossibility (McRuer, 2006). In other words, through technology we ‘enforce normalcy’ (Davis, 2005), at the same time we fail to acknowledge normalcy as a fictional and unstable category, which is inherently unattainable.

Observation: I’m interested in exploring further how the fiction or mythology of a normalcy, healthy/able is also conflated in our culture with notions of morality, honour and value. When the hero is described as, “Never sick a day in his life. Never missed a day of work.” we conflate ability and work ethic. That hero is pervasive in colonial, puritanical mythology? And we take that unattainable heroic path and map it to what technology can and should do: it can make up for bodily deficiencies in service of attaining economic efficiencies. But then what of my own adoration for a mythic heroine, who paints or writes or transforms worlds from a sickbed, wheelchair or asylum: Frida Khalo, Janet Frame, Agnes Martin, Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Syrus Marcus Ware, Alice Sheppard and so, so many more? I am unsettled and motivated, as were/are they. More to unpack.

More on this coming soon.