INT 902 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Macmillan Publishers, Disability Rights Movement, Disability Studies
10 Aug 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
People-first language is best understood as part of an ongoing process that removes the possibility of understanding disability as a social, and thereby complex, political phenomenon. How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation. People with disabilities is the dominant linguistic formulation of disability in canada and deserves sociological consideration: this phrase has been in circulation since the 1970"s, and was consolidated in 1983 with the international year of the disabled. This lexicon recommends that disability should be spoken of as something that comes along with people. People-first phraseology conceives disability as a troublesome condition arbitrarily attached to some people, a condition that is only significant as a remedial or managerial issue. The assumption that people-first phraseology is devoid of objectification subverts the possibility of a critical analysis of this unified discursive formulation of disability.
