49 results
Dorstone Hill: a Neolithic timescape
- Keith Ray, Julian Thomas, Nick Overton, Seren Griffiths, Tim Hoverd, Michael J. Allen, Alistair Barclay, Julie Birchenall, Dana Challinor, Charley French, Elizabeth Healey, Rob Ixer, Anne Roseveare, Martin Roseveare, Irene Garcia Rovira, Adam Stanford, Isabel Wiltshire
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Studies of early fourth-millennium BC Britain have typically focused on the Early Neolithic sites of Wessex and Orkney; what can the investigation of sites located in areas beyond these core regions add? The authors report on excavations (2011–2019) at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire, which have revealed a remarkable complex of Early Neolithic monuments: three long barrows constructed on the footprints of three timber buildings that had been deliberately burned, plus a nearby causewayed enclosure. A Bayesian chronological model demonstrates the precocious character of many of the site's elements and strengthens the evidence for the role of tombs and houses/halls in the creation and commemoration of foundational social groups in Neolithic Britain.
Chapter 9 - Revising the Illegitimate
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- Anthem Press
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 131-146
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In this chapter we answer the question of how offending bodies become the object for revision once they are identified and legitimated. Strategies from medicine, psychology, theology, and education are critically engaged.
Revision
Recall the general description of revision in Chapter 1 as the least extreme response offered to bodies who are deemed to require tweaking. We noted that the goals of this response were to identify the something else members, and then to make small changes in person and/or context such that the status quo of humanness as defined by humanism and neo-humanism remains undisturbed. The offender is nudged to the extent possible from the outlier neighborhood into the zone of age-referenced averages. Bodies that typically fall into this container include those who sport mobility, cognitive, sensory, and some psychiatric impairment credentials, which are degenerating as they age. The revision carpenter belt contains many tools, from simple instructions in skills never acquired or lost in action to selective genetic and surgical manipulation of impaired fetuses and bodies. Additions built onto existing structures and spaces are part of this grand schematic to maintain the prototypical universe as is while annexing the squeaky wheels to placate.
Before prospecting into the repository of embodied and environmental revisions, however, we set the foundations in definition and historical precedent. The word revision is defined as an amendment, alteration, or correction (Dictionary.com LLC, 2020). Its very synonyms reveal its strengths and its limitations. Certainly, revision is designed to foster improvement, as in the revision of a book. Of importance to this analysis is understanding revision as the overhaul of something that already exists. Subsumed in this approach are two opposites; inherent value in what already is, or an entity that is not worth more extreme effort. To us, revision makes ultimate sense when the something to be revised is vital and in need of only small repairs. More profound and enduring change does not lend itself to this subspecies of alteration.
Summoning its history, revision is a theoretical term that has often been perceived as pejorative. Revisionism as a movement and theoretical fashion gained its fame as far back as Marx when scholars such as Bernstein introduced pacifism and coexistence of disparate classes into Marxism by excising revolution as the agent of change (Valencia-García, 2020).
Chapter 6 - The Language of Violation
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Book:
- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 63-86
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We are all condemned to the impossibility of gaining full access to other people's minds.
—Wilkinson (2008, 323)How violations and their meanings are named and communicated comprise the substance of this chapter. Labeling in medicine and diagnosis, popular culture (Brandt & Clare, 2018) the political correctness of the academy, and nonexample or absence from these lexicons are investigated and illustrated. Words, however they are cobbled, loosely or orchestrated symphonically, express ideas, albethey within the listeners interpretive receipt (Boroditsky, 2018). The importance of language in delineating humanness and “something elses” cannot, therefore, be understated. So, in this chapter, we enter and more closely rub elbows with words, text, and the narrative images that describe and are proffered for humans and alters. It is curious to note that even in scholarship on posthumanism, which deconstructs the humanist essence as we currently recognize ourselves, what remains constant is the use of words to convey meaning and recruit fans. It seems as if even within claims of a posthuman world, words and language remain intact despite the theorized and even preferred absence of metamorphosis of other embodied features. Recall that the importance of articulation has been ubiquitous across multiple times and places, even among the humanism that is so decried by postmodern and posthuman philosophers. These artifacts of communication in the forms of production, reception, and interaction influence and converge to imply meaning, manipulate behavior, persuade, reflect, and assign value. Words, text, and the imagery they produce provide a rich sea of inscription and form in which disability theories have done their axiological, theoretical, and proclamation work. More expansively, narrative imaging of the embodied disabled predicament crafts humanness and its environs. We therefore consolidate our attention on this ingenuity to further analyze how each and then all create the human and expel the other.
Defining and differentiating text, word, and narrative is no longer simple in a universe in which these symbolic entities intermingle and engorge themselves with power.
Chapter 5 - The Tool Kit
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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Legitimating humanness requires a plethora of tools, some narrowly delimited to a field of knowledge and others broadly analytic and synthetic. In this chapter, we examine a host of methods that are used to confer humanness status, beginning with the nature of knowledge and philosophical thought itself, and then proceed to narratives and imagery of science. The non-prototypical body is front and center in contrasting the human and the something else, and thus has a critical job in the humanness enterprise as well as in its opposite, nonhuman, or its contingent, akin to but not fully human.
Tool one—humanization, infrahumanization, and dehumanization as philosophical construction
Philosophers have concerned themselves with reasoning and articulating the nature of humans as a central job function. In particular, they prattle about the ontology of humanness, its existence, and its essences. The primary, though not the only, tools of the ontological trade involve definition, argumentation, example, contingent and nonexample, logic, speculation, and convincing rhetoric (Williamson, 2020). Nevertheless, the adage where one sits comes full circle as thinking and articulation need a starting point from which to unfold in a linear or meandering logic structure. Mastering and employing philosophical tools can attract followers to one's theoretical point of view, change minds, and convince the listener about the nature of reality, the “real human”, and the ones who do not quite fit the bill.
Consider the exemplar arguments. According to Bourke (2011, 15):
To understand the instability of definitions of who is truly human, we need history. Stories and myths enable people in the past (and today) to make sense of a thoroughly bewildering world populated by an unimaginable number and range of sentient beings. In the words of Jacques Derrida, paying attention to the full community of sentient beings “ ‘poses grave definitional and practical threats to the discourse of humanism’ which attributes ‘authority and autonomy […] to the man […] rather than to the woman, and to the woman rather than to the animal.’ “ By looking back into the past we can trace competing ways in which “the human” and “he animal” have been imagined.
Chapter 10 - Reinvention
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 147-162
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Your body is nothing less than the universe in motion. Reinventing the body means reinventing the whole universe.
—Chopra (2009)In our conceptual framework, reinvention is the response to illegitimate humans who are one or many degrees removed from what is considered to be human and corporeal nature. But before intellectually sowing this fertile, intoxicating, and sometimes disquieting field, a little clarification is in order. What do we mean by reinvention and what is its scope? How does reinvention define humanness and its beyond?
The word reinvention means to produce something new that is based on something that already exists. (Cambridge Dictionary, 2020)
This dictionary definition therefore proposes that the raw marble slab exists, awaiting sculpting. Applied to humanness violators, the something elses are present, recognized, and named, but are not acceptable in their current form. If revision is not attaining its goal to legitimate these offender beings, two additional options are available, reinvention for the lucky, and denial for the unfortunate who are eliminated, or never materialize in the first place.
A second point before analysis, we disclose what led us to even thinking about reinvention in the first place. We noted earlier in the book that our thinking about humanness was piqued at several crossroads in which the scholarly and personal intersected, including wrestling with our changing bodies as we acquire more time lived, and the capacities for which we no longer were able to use our corporeal matter. Reinvention, however, was specific to our own recent reading work in two areas of technology research and development and the redesign of our barn, introduced in Chapter 8.
Area one involved a robot experiment. Because our university only offered a cafeteria meal service, the something elses who could not carry a tray had a limited menu of options, so to speak, in how to join colleagues in a meal in these dining establishments and events. One could just watch everyone else eat, bring delectables to the meal in a prepackaged “carriable” form reminiscent of the lunchbox school days, or make a plea for help from a willing, charitable prototype. So we set out to reinvent the experience by inventing a robot to do the wait person job in a sexy and flashy manner.
Chapter 13 - Expansion and Commencement
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 195-208
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This conclusion posits desirable outcomes of renegotiation. We discuss and illustrate how redefining diversity unlocks the nonessentialist gate necessary for the humanness literacy agenda that we foresee. Individual and ubiquitous ownership of diversity eradicates division and thus allows collective commitment to innovation in order to expand the welcome mat and boundaries for diversity as humanness. Both the chapter and the book end with an urgent call for commencement of dynamic and sustained dialog, debate, tolerance, and acceptance of bodies representing the full continuum of human form and function as the basis for reinvention.
Scholarship, while a necessary beginning of the imaginary, does not rest on its laurels simply by answering “what and who” questions. The author must answer the difficult hows. In this final chapter, we therefore propose and illustrate a present and future vision of principles to respond to expansive humanness literacy.
First, a snippet summary of the previous chapters is offered as the basis for the conclusions put forth in this chapter. We began by exploring legitimacy and its application to humanness, examining the temporal and disciplinary. The diagnosed disabled body then made its appearance as an offender of medicalized, acculturated normalcy, or what has been referred to as prototype and desirable humanness. The three disability model genres, medical, social and interactive, were then introduced to characterize and critically read how violators are crafted by the normal curve and science narratives, with the interactive disjuncture model (DePoy and Gilson, 2011) held in abeyance as the potential framework for healing the binary rift between prototype and something elses. Built and green environment, narrative, and visual and digital imagery were read for their meanings, their exclusions, and who is advantaged as prototype human and its nonexample. In the next section, a continuum of three response levels, revision, reinvention, and denial to the offender body were forensically analyzed, both for their “rights and wrongs.”
Finally, the initial chapter in this two chapter conclusion (Chapter 12) posited a reinvention of humanness, which we referred to as humanness literacy, in which rereading the human becomes the equivalent of embodied and experiential diversity as both changing and changeless. Thus, in this narrative of humanness the only essential characteristics of the human are diversity and imperfections (Sandel, 2016), to which response is invited.
Chapter 1 - Legitimate and Offending Bodies
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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Disability has the radical potential to trouble the normative, rational, independent, autonomous subject that is so often imagined when the human is evoked.
—Goodley and Brunswick-Cole (2014, 2)Answers to the question “what is legitimate and desirable humanness” is not banter one might hear in public. But, nonetheless, embodied desirability, what we accept as “the good life” for ourselves, compared to the other who does not fit, and what humanness elements we propose as the object of scrutiny, fixing, or elimination inhere in the commercial, cultural, medical, and social ether of daily life. Holding the hand of the “disabled being” as alter, this book materializes shrouded history and current literature on disability illustrated by thoughts and praxis, exposing the legitimate human and its opposite. Beyond theorizing for its own aggrandizement, we seek a purpose of provoking thought as the basis for informed action.
For over 40 years, the impairment definition of disability and its associate, age-related decline, referred to as the medical model, have been pommeled by disability studies and aging scholars. Early social theorists focused on and wrested disability away from the impaired body and located it in the terrain of social, attitudinal, political, economic, and even spiritual discrimination (Rembis et al., 2018). Aging theorists recolored Eriksonian notions of reflection and withdrawal from life into a vibrant conclusion chapter in which medical notions of disability, albethey present, were typical but incidental to productive contribution (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2009; Erikson, 1959). These analyses, including our own thinking, were concerned with the what and how of disability. The what is a definitional debate (Momm & Geiecker, (2011). Scholars ask “is disability a decrepit embodied phenomenon,” a fait accompli as one moves beyond halfcentury lived, a social arrangement begetting discrimination, a profit motif, an abrogation of rights, and then provide answers that increase in complexity and bleed into other essentialist intersections about similar questions surrounding human difference and the atypical. Defining what disability is is not a trivial pursuit in that the “what” beckons the how, or the response.
Different from the impairment or medical model which invites professional surveillance and control, the social model requests change from all but the impaired body. Integrating and activating impairment within a hostile context creates a three-dimensional (3D) canvas on which complex responses can be drawn and offered.
Part 3 - Responses
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 129-130
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This part examines how the bodies identified and depicted in Part 2 are met with praxis and axiological responses from revision through exclusion.
Chapter 4 - The Offensive Scope
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 35-46
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In this chapter we put legitimacy theory to work. Following the well-used adage, where one stands on the legitimate definition of offending bodies depends on where one has been theoretically and contextually seated. As such the offending scope is not only wide but multidimensional, thereby creating a consensus quagmire about who is “disabled” or what disability actually is. It follows that a single definition of disability as an offending body is neither possible nor useful for developing a firm grasp of the complexity of how disability makes its contribution to defining humanness and its partial and nonexamples. In other words, who is a legitimate member of humanness without embodied violations and who is eschewed from that preferred group are the questions that remain. The scope of answers is a wide abstract, and contradictory, despite the myth that science and medicine are truth “fact-ories” that rest their claims on evidentiary “proof “ for defining and distinguishing group parameters of outliers, majoritarians, and their less valuable minoritarians.
What is considered an atypical body differs according to time, place, and intellectual context. In each era there have been several potential, assumed, and accepted explanations for a single atypical human characteristic or disabling phenomenon. As discussed in Chapter 3, these explanations form the basis for legitimate categorization and subsequent response to category members. Moreover, these rationales reveal the whys of category assignment and alterity branding by diagnosis or embodied circumstance. The responses proffered to the “marked other” provide an analytic sneak peek into the beliefs, values, politics, economics, intellectual trends, and the level of technological development of the time, as well as a reflective platform on how current conceptualizations of disability shape the larger puzzle of human categorization.
Why is impairment even important to human legitimacy? Barth (2018, 5) posits one important answer from the distributive justice perspective:
The challenges the human race is facing will require that humanity, as a collective, leverage the potential of each individual to a far greater degree of effectiveness than any society has previously accomplished. All of these questions, debates, and contentions revolve around a single aspect of human life that constitutes one of the most important conduits between individual and societal life, namely ability.
Contents
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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Chapter 12 - Negotiating Humanness
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 181-194
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In this final part of the book, we build on our critical work from previous chapters and on contemporary post-postmodernist and posthuman marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking humanness. Given our focus on interpretive reading, we refer to this reinvention framework as humanness literacy. In the chapters that preceded this part of the book we focused on forensic analysis, or what has failed in current humanness and thinking and praxis. We now propose the revision and reevaluation of legitimate humanness and its sidecar, diversity, from categorical to continuous human experience, with renegotiation of the atypical as the entrance into innovative removal of divisive essentialism. Temporal and contextual solutions are proposed and illustrated to conclude this work.
For this project, we assert that reading and negotiating the meaning of humanness and human diversity, thereby developing humanness literacy relevant and just for the twenty-first century, must be a function of informed and uncensored debate, consensus, and/or respectful pluralism in the presence of disagreement. We propose pluralistic theoretical praxis, and contexts in which such activity can and should occur.
Thus, this chapter begins our excitation as we surpass enlightenment humanism to enter a future in which humanness literacy is an expansive reinvention inviting of all bodies. Recall that in previous chapters we have critically wrestled with conceptualizations of humanness, its violators, and responses to violators. Now, we arrive at the raison d’etre for this multilayered forensic examination, which may have been unsettling and sometimes caustic, but intended to be potent in illuminating an alternative, creative direction for reading humanness literacy anew, in which violator status, as articulated by Gabbard below, is duly scolded and eliminated:
The term “human” occupies a central place in disability studies because people living with physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychosocial impairments have so often been deemed to be not fully human or even animals with human faces. (Gabbard, 2015, 98)
Along with Gabbard, Wolfe's reference to Linton and Davis's work resonates:
After the divisive strategies of the past, which sought to stake out and hold on to the specificity of disability as a category we now “need to find a new way of talking about the place of disabled people in the universe and to find the place of disability in some universal.”
Chapter 11 - Denial
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 163-178
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In this chapter we analyze denial, a complex set of processes and outcomes that result in prohibiting or ending characteristics possessed by the something elses within the boundaries of desirable humanness. Braidotti (2019) referred to the ancient Greek concept of zoe, a collective life force which extends beyond the individual or anthropomorphic bios. To an extent, zoe has great relevance to denial in that zoe instills life regardless of its container, and thus does not judge its normative acceptability as articulated in the notion of bios below.
Human existence is not only naturally given as animal life but is also assigned as a task: to exist humanly is to live life according to a certain form of life. (Heiden, 2020, 62)
Zoe is the antithesis of bios-based denial. We return to this theme in the final chapters of the book in which we take on rethinking humanness not as classical humanism, but rather as a broader, nonhierarchical conceptualization (Peterson, 2018). We thus leave the uplifting future ahead as a promise, as we move into a murky territory of denial, first examining dehumanization and infrahumanization as the initial processes that set the table for denial to be served. We then exemplify methods and strategies that are used to deny something else bodies.
As we have already introduced, the distinct existence of zoe and bios have been debated since ancient Greece. Can the body at work be separated from its life force? If so, how, and if not, what bodies should be denied zoe if any? In his most recent work, Smith (2020) takes on dehumanization primarily on the basis of constructed ideas of race, ethnicity, and gender. Although he proclaims that ableism and ageism, the two major areas of othering that we are addressing in this work, are not equivalent to his tenets of dehumanization, we do not fully agree. We did, however, find some of his theoretical framework relevant to our analysis. Recall that others suggest that dehumanization is a process which: (1) fails to distinguish the dehumanized from object or nonhuman animal; (2) stereotypes; (3) perceives the non or infrahuman as lacking characteristics believed as essential for human belonging; or (4) dementalizes the object.
Part 4 - Rethinking Humanness
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 179-180
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This part invokes contemporary post-postmodernist and posthuman marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking humanness. Building on our previous scholarship, we propose the revision and reevaluation of diversity from categorical to continuous human experience, with renegotiation of the atypical as the entrance into innovation. Temporal and contextual solutions are proposed and illustrated to conclude this work.
List of Figures
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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Part 2 - Violations
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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In this part we examine embodied criteria of “humanness” and offending corporeal characteristics. The four chapters in Part 2 describe and analyze how offenders are identified and depicted in diverse contexts.
Chapter 3 - Looking Back
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 17-32
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Many questions emerge and remain about which spectacles create insight into the history of disability as a challenge to humanness. As we approached this chapter and cast a wide reading net for it, clarity was not forthcoming from the many ways in which scholars have historicized the construct and longitude of disability. However, although there may be some intellectual outliers, from a synthetic gaze, the bulk of disability history, regardless of professed opposition to painting disability as organic, still foregrounds its history in impaired bodies (Hanes et al., 2018; Stiker, 1997). Yet, implied in much of the scholarship in disability studies are many questions regarding its history:
Is disability history the history of the atypical body?
Is disability history the history of the norm, the prototype, and its opposite?
Is disability history the history of beauty and its opposite?
Is disability history a series of longitudinal and geographic events related to changes in the prototype?
Is disability history theological, artistic, ethical?
Is disability history a chronicle of attitudes and intergroup relations?
Is disability history an evolutionary phenomenon?
Is disability history a history of rights, lack of rights, and human emancipation?
Is disability history the history of changing criteria for human worth over the years?
Is the history of disability a history of infrahumanization? Monstrosity? (Godden and Mittman, 2019)
Is disability history a history of eugenics? (Van Tirgt, 2019)
Is disability history the history of one's parenthood?
Is disability history the history of what social groups cannot handle among their midst (DePoy and Gilson, 2011)?
Is disability history the history of human incapacity (Stiker, 2002; 2019)?
Is disability history the history of control and containment?
Is disability history the history of punishment for immorality or sin?
Is disability history the history of disability as divergence from the human genome?
Is disability history the history of atypical neurology (Bryson, 2020)?
More recently, additional nodes and relationships have been added to this crowded intellectual network. While not exclusively historical in focus, these views relinquish the impaired body and thus beg for different histories than those already told.
Chapter 8 - Spaces and Places
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 01 March 2022, pp 109-128
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In this chapter we build on the visual world of Chapter 7 to examine the role of architecture, the natural environment, and spatial design in foregrounding and responding to the violating body. Typically, the term accessible environments refers to the big three violation teams: mobility, visual, and hearing offenders of the prototype. We meet with these offenders in this chapter, but expand analysis to non-prototypes from the minor leagues as well. Now, we begin with architecture and the built physical environment, relax boundaries to languish in the natural environment, and then engage with virtual design.
Before proceeding further with analysis, two points are important to consider. First, what is the scope of built environment access? Access is typically read as entering, navigating, functioning, and leaving a space. However, recognizing building and space as more than surface cosmetics and what we see extends the continuum of access from rigidity to malleability (Sanders, 2018). Built environment musculature and skeleton, cells, and organs must be fluid and flexible to meet access needs understood as dynamic, particularly with biotechnicalized cyborgian bodies and rapidly evolving technological worlds. Buildings, spaces, and structures have entrails beyond the facade and the palpable that are not readily viewed or understood by those who are cloaked within. However, the active life of joists, supports, and other materials hiding under the skins of built envelopes need to be engaged in structures that keep pace with change.
Cabin Anna (Cabin ANNA, 2020) is the first exhibit that exemplifies the life of structures.
This cabin has ability to adapt and change thanks to its moving structure, it also reflects beautiful changes of outdoor environment. You can enjoy sun emerging after a rainstorm, bathing in the living room under the light, or witnessing a flock of swallows swarming above your opened roof, a romantic evening with sudden gust of wind blowing through the dining space. It can be said that the cabin is another organism within the larger eco-system.
A second example illustrates the wisdom of historic builders, perhaps without intentional concern for change or access, but nonetheless educational for current practitioners. Recently, we aimed to revise the navigation around and inside of our barn to meet the needs of our aging limbs and lifting capacity.
Chapter 7 - The Visual Violator
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 01 March 2022, pp 87-108
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Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in the City of County of San Francisco, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view—San Francisco “Ugly Law,” 1867.
—Smithsonian (n.d.)How the offending corpus and its assigned meanings are depicted in visual media (e.g., film, illustration, curated display, online imagery, visual symbol such as the international symbol of access, access to low vision, etc.) form the substance of this chapter. Violations enter via a number of doorways: the body itself, the objects surrounding it, the cartoon body, the contemporary moving pictures in the form of digitals, among many more.
Doorway #1: The body itself
As the organic seat of dehumanization, the body sits as object. According to Langton, equating the sum total of body with its appearance is a tool that easily locks or unlocks the portal to humanness (Langton, 2009). We introduced soothsayer Harlan Hahn (1988) in previous chapters, who saw a precise reflection of Langton's tenet in his nonambulatory body appearance serving as fodder for markdown (Rhode, 2010). His incisive anxiety pronouncements about the appearance of impairment, along with interpretations of the imagery, as distressing were ideas about the impaired body that exposed the objectified corpus beyond its sexuality (Rhodes, 2010). As Hahn theorized, aesthetic anxiety, the quickening, sickening feeling that one gets when looking at a visual image perceived as unsightly is further complicated with layers of existential dilemmas about the meaning of the vision. Questions provoked by even a surreptitious curious glancer without ever conversing with the object of the gaze might include:
Would I be able to live if I looked that?
What is life and function like for someone who looks like that?
What would the life I assume lived by that “unattractive person” be like for me?
Would anyone like me? Be attracted to me? Hire me, sit next to me?
What would others think of me when they looked at me?
Would I be pitied, feared, the object of laughter?
Chapter 2 - Bedrock Constructs
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 9-16
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Summary
In this chapter, we provide a smidge more introductory material in our preparatory homework for the reader. We begin with legitimacy, given its starring role in this project. In this context, legitimacy refers to questions about what it means to be a legitimate human, its inferior or its opposite, and interrogate the terrain of who is accepted as a full member in the humanness club: when and when not; why and why not; how and how not. There is no dearth of opinions, each informed by different fields of thinking. A simple biological definition of human, for example, qualifies one as belonging simply by exhibiting the human form, defined by Wittgenstein as legitimacy by virtue of being conceived by human parents (Hanfling, 2002). Of course, there is really nothing uncomplicated about this definition given the many facets of timing, body composition, distinction from species nonexamples, and even technological additions to the organic corpus. In this book we delimit our definition to serve the analysis of the role of impairment and the multidimensional collage of responses to it in crafting humanness.
Enter the application of legitimacy theories to analyze authentic humanness and its nonexamples. Legitimacy is the feature story in Chapter 4, and acts as a trailer here to entice the reader. At the very least, legitimacy thinking lays bare the essential factors that bestow acceptance, membership, respect, and their nonexamples within the context of diverse social systems and arrangements. Applied to understanding the role of impairment in determining who fully or partially passes the humanness test, or who fails it altogether, legitimacy foregrounds the body, behavior, and appearance as the loci of judged explanations and construction of desirability (DePoy and Gilson, 2011).
Legitimacy has both a long history and wide girth. Longitudinally, legitimacy can be traced as far back as the writings of the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, in 423 BCE, in which questions were posed and answered about the unfolding and moral correctness of power and its acceptance by subordinates. Although legitimacy theory originally had its roots in political theory, it became engorged and expanded its analytic reach way beyond its initial perimeter to fields as disparate as rhetoric, visual culture, and even accounting (Puyou and Quatronne, 2018; Luthardt, 2011).
Index
- Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen French Gilson
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- Book:
- Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2022, pp 227-237
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