Disability Media Research Articles

Ethopolitical media: Organizing Assistive Technology, disability and care in the platform society

In this paper we prompt a re-reading of Assistive Technology (AT) as a media system that organizes disability in the framework of digital health-care and the platform society. Drawing on disability media studies and organization studies, we investigate how the arrival of big tech and digital platforms in the field of AT reconfigures ways to account for, classify and potentially discriminate against disability. We argue that this new configuration can be explained as a shift from a biopolitical model – oriented toward disability normalization – to an ethopolitical model, oriented toward optimization and health enhancement. In the conclusions, we put forward the concept of ethopolitical media and discuss the implications of this for wider debates in media and cultural studies which deal with the relationship between media, health, and self-care.

Mental Health vs Mutual Aid: Competing Visions of Care in Black-authored Films in the 1970s

This article considers two little-noted films from the early 1970s that took up a Black politics of "mental health." Both films intervened into racial-liberalist psychiatric and social scientific discourses of "Black pathologies" by drawing from Black radical and community-organizing models to envision how to care for people in distress outside of dominant psychiatric and psychological discourses and institutions. With shared production and institutional contexts yet differing articulations of what radical forms of care looked like both in practice, in narrative, and in mediation, these two films deepen our understanding of what form a Black disability politics of mental health took in this era. They also expand how disability studies as well as disability media studies frame the connections among anti-psychiatry and mad studies movements, Black radicalism and organizing, and cultural production.

An Introduction

An Introduction

Changing Times

Changing Times

Physical Disability and Physical Activity Involvement Portrayal in the Media

Disability media studies articulates the formation of a new field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability. Television, film, current periodicals, and other mass media are a part of our everyday lives. Attitudes regarding a variety of issues can be affected by these media, not the least of which are attitudes toward disability. Media is a significant part of contemporary society and culture and is subsequently crucial to our understanding of disability. The representation of disability in the media in the last ten years is pretty much the same as it has always been: clichéd, stereotyped, and archetypal. Media representation of and for the disabled has been recharged in recent years with the expansion of new media worldwide. Interactive digital communications [such as the Internet, new varieties of voice and text telephones, social media, and digital broadcasting] have created a need to explore the constructs of media and the media relationship with disability. To explore this topic, we asked the same questions posed by scholars, how exactly does the media interact with disability and vice versa? Does the media adequately reflect the lives of people with disabilities?

Review: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne

Review: <i>Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment</i>, by Jonathan Sterne

Un/recognisable and dis/empowering images of disability: a collective textual analysis of media representations of intellectual disabilities

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a framework of five consecutive but potentially intersecting tropes of representation of intellectual disabilities. The framework was developed in a post-qualitative manner by a researcher collective of people labeled with and without intellectual disabilities. As many existing disability media analyses have been reproached for being un-nuanced, elitist and reductionist, our approach and framework offer a more layered, ambivalent and complex interpretation of media representations of intellectual disabilities. More specifically, we unpack representations that (1) patronize people with disabilities, (2) consolidate, (3) deconstruct and (4) reconstruct the hegemonic order on dis/ability and (5) impose an ableist normalcy. Although the framework was developed by means of a collective textual analysis of a specific case, i.e. Tytgat Chocolat, a Flemish television series on people with intellectual disabilities, we argue that it also serves as a valuable starting point for further analysis of media texts on (intellectual) disabilities.

Materiality, mediation and affective encounters: ‘Rising Phoenix’ and the cultural representation of disability

Paralympic and Para sport representation has provided an important cultural site from which to explore the role of popular disability media in shaping everyday disability knowledge(s) through relations of power, ideology and meaning. Yet limited attention has been afforded to the affective dimensions of Para sport media that may help extend our understanding of its performative power on audiences. In critique of the recent Netflix Paralympic documentary film, ‘Rising Phoenix’, this article affords particular attention to the production of disability affects through the cinematic entanglement of things, bodies and language that work to involve audiences on an affective, emotional and sensorial level. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's (2004) cultural politics of emotion, it is argued that the film produces an economy of disability affects that contribute to the qualitative affective qualities of the film yet operate to (re-)configure sites of disabled normativity, gendered disability relations and nourish ‘supercrip’ and ‘medico-tragedy’ disability narratives. Attention is paid to the implications of this and the role of sport documentary film more widely in generating affective modes of representation for marginalised sporting groups.

Review of Disability Media Studies edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick

No abstract available.

Imaginários sobre a deficiência: mobilização de afetos cotidianos em campanhas publicitárias

Propomos uma aproximação entre estudos sobre mídia e estudos sobre deficiência como norteadora das reflexões a respeito de imaginários sobre a deficiência em campanhas publicitárias de grandes marcas. Para tal, apresentamos aspectos críticos sobre o modelo social da deficiência, a noção de imaginários sociodiscursivos ancorados na Análise do Discurso, a evidência de afetos cotidianos em discursos publicitários e o uso de estratégias sensíveis para a mobilização do público. A partir de uma articulação teórico-metodológica vinculada a uma abordagem de inspiração etnográfica em redes sociais digitais, realizamos uma experiência de observação empírica da campanha de Natal da Sadia de 2017. O vídeo principal da campanha tem como protagonista uma garota com síndrome de Down, que se prepara para uma competição esportiva e suscita reações de pessoas comuns, com e sem deficiência. A análise revela como o caso despertou no público sentimentos articulados a valores individuais em permanente tensão com temáticas sociais amplas, como a inclusão e o respeito à diferença. Como conclusão, apontamos para o afeto como potente operador conceitual na reflexão sobre imaginários sociodiscursivos dos estudos de deficiência na mídia.

Disability media aesthetics: Voices of the war-disabled people in post-war German-language radio plays

This article explores the way the Radio Play Prize of the War Blind negotiated disability, media and aesthetics in post-war Germany. Initiated in 1951 by the League of the War Blind in the FRG, the prize developed a singular political power and aesthetic influence in the German-language radio play culture of the 1950s. The aim of this article is to discuss the prize within a broader debate about German radio during this critical period of its development from a propaganda tool of fascism to a (supposedly) democratic space of plural opinions and ideas. To that purpose, I will first present the historical conditions out of which the prize emerged. Second, I will reconstruct the discourse about blindness in contemporary writings on the theory and aesthetics of radio plays. I will then analyse Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s radio play Stranitzky und der Nationalheld that deals critically with the constellation of people disabled in war and the radio. Based on this literary perspective on subaltern and powerful voices, my article questions the correlation of Nazi theatre and German post-war radio play. Finally, I will present newly uncovered archival material that proposes a new perspective on the emergence of the radio play in post-war Germany.

Studying Disability for a Better Cinema and Media Studies

Studying Disability for a Better Cinema and Media Studies Elizabeth Ellcessor (bio) and Bill Kirkpatrick If you are reading this, you are probably already on board with the study of difference. Gender, critical race theory, class analyses, postcolonialism, or queer studies are a part of your scholarship, or at least a grace note in your graduate education. (If you are not reading this, let us take a moment to say that you should be. You're missing much of the most exciting work in cinema and media studies.) Despite your best intentions, however, you may not have encountered critical studies of media and disability in any meaningful way. It is not just missing from our scholarship; there are few job calls for experts in media and disability, precious few graduate seminars, rarely even a unit on disability in undergraduate courses. Disability is not listed as an area of expertise when you join SCMS or as a keyword when you submit to its conference. Disability largely remains what Goggin and Newell fifteen years ago identified as a "lacuna" in our field.1 Rather than bemoan this state of affairs, we pose a challenge: start incorporating disability into your work. We call for a disability media studies that advances the field by integrating disability and able-bodiedness as a category of analysis for film and media scholars.2 [End Page 139] Like feminist film and media theory, a disability perspective is not primarily about the study of representations. Over thirty years ago, Joan Scott had to explain to her colleagues that a gender perspective is not primarily about the ontology of sex differences; similarly, we want colleagues to realize that disability is not the ontology of impairment but, borrowing Scott's phrase, "a primary way of signifying relationships of power."3 We are not simply looking for "the cripple in the text"; we are interrogating the dynamics of power and normalization that produce certain kinds of bodies, sensoriums, and cognitivities as "able, normal, better" and others as "disabled, abnormal, worse." A disability perspective, then, is about decentering the physically and cognitively "normal" character, the "normal" viewer, the "normal" producer, and so on; this has profound consequences for the study of media texts, industrial practices, social relations, media policies, modes of reception, and the design of technologies and spaces. It is about rethinking the stories told, the writers and actors hired, the economics of industries, the politics of access and representation, and the range of possible readings (think "cripping the text" as analogous to "queering the text"). It is about listening to new voices and engaging in new political struggles over power and privilege. Disability raises fascinating new questions, offers intellectually compelling new perspectives, and reveals exciting new insights about media and society. Cinema and media studies as a whole can benefit if disability is better integrated into our working knowledges, routine frames of analysis, standard professional and pedagogical categories, curricula, and understandings of the archive. As the essays in this In Focus—and a growing body of scholarship elsewhere—abundantly demonstrate, the transformation is already under way. Here, then, are some ways that a disability lens can help transform cinema and media studies into a better version of itself. "Disability" Is an Operation of Power When most people hear "disability," they imagine an ontological medical impairment that, in an ideal world, would be "fixed." In contrast, scholars in disability studies understand disability as a condition of difference that has been produced through discourse, by the built environment, and through social relations.4 The classic example: a wheelchair user is not inherently "disabled" but rather is produced as "disabled" in the absence of ramps—a social and political choice. What is hegemonically understood as the normal, able body is, in this view, simply the "normate," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's term for a privileged body, without stigma, that functions as a universal and unmarked type in a given society (analogous to "cis" in queer theory).5 [End Page 140] By moving away from a singular medical model of disability that sees physical and cognitive difference as "impairment in need of a cure," and recognizing that all bodies are constructed and valuated according to shifting...

Disability and haptic mobile media

This article examines haptic media from the standpoint of disability media studies. Its central case study is the smartphone moment, in which mobile communication emerges as a mass haptic media form. The smartphone as a form of haptic media engages dynamics of disability, including touch, vibration and proprioception. In particular, vibration is an important contribution of the smartphone to haptic media. Overall, the article argues that we need to understand the socio-technical dynamics of disability, and its complex relationships with senses and technology, in order to understand the histories that constitute current media – as well as to imagine future haptic mobile media.

User-Generated Captions: From Hackers, to the Disability Digerati, to Fansubbers

User-Generated Captions: From Hackers, to the Disability Digerati, to Fansubbers

Indefinitely beyond Our Reach: The Case for Elevating Audio Description to the Importance of Captions on Australian Television

Indefinitely beyond Our Reach: The Case for Elevating Audio Description to the Importance of Captions on Australian Television

Video on Demand for People with Disability: Traversing Terrestrial Borders

Within Australia, the approach taken to the ways in which disabled people access television is heavily influenced by legislation and activism from abroad. This is increasingly the case as television moves to online modes of distribution where physical and legislative boundaries are more fluid. While early investigations of the intersections between television and the concept of abroad focused on the impacts of representation and national reputation (Boddy), the introduction of new media technologies saw a shifting focus towards the impact and introduction of new media technologies. Drawing on Chan’s definition of media internationalisation as “the process by which the ownership, structure, production, distribution, or content of a country’s media is influenced by foreign media interests, culture and markets” (Chan 71), this article considers the impacts of legislative and advocacy efforts abroad on Australian television audiences with disabilities accessing subscription Video on Demand (VOD)...

Disability and the Internet in 2015: Where to now?

Earlier this decade, the emerging field of disability media began to focus on the Internet and people with disabilities. Books such as Paul T. Jaeger’s Disability and the Internet in 2012 and Disability and new media by this issue’s editors in 2011 both extended earlier work in this field particularly Goggin and Newell’s 2003 Digital disability.This new focus incorporated changes to the environment with the hype around Web 2.0, the rise of online social networks and the increasing prevalence of smartphone and other mobile devices being used to access the Internet, as well as the evolving legal environment around access to technology for people with disabilities.Our aim in compiling this special issue was to continue the work we began with Disability and new media.

Accessible television: The new frontier in disability media studies brings together industry innovation, government legislation and online activism

As television moves beyond digital broadcast modes of distribution towards online modes of delivery, this paper considers the opportunities and challenges for people with disabilities. With accessibility relying on a complex mix of regulation, legislation and industry innovation, the paper questions whether predictions of improved accessibility are an automatic outcome of new television technologies. The paper asks ‘where to next?’ for disability and the Internet through an emphasis on the importance of television in an accessible new media environment. The paper draws on government policies, the activist intervention of a number of people with disabilities as documented online, and primary research into Australian television audiences with disabilities that took place in 2013 and 2014.

Disability Media Participation: Opportunities, Obstacles and Politics

This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses the relative absence of explicit discussion and research on disability in the literatures on community, citizen and alternative media. By contrast, disability has emerged as an important element of participatory cultures and digital technologies. To explore disability participatory cultures, the article offers analysis of case studies, including disability blogs, ABC's Ramp Up website and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter).

Fame and Disability

Fame and Disability