Dis/Abling Practices: Rethinking Disability

• Authors: Michael Schillmeier
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper discusses how ordinary acts of everyday life make up the complex and contingent scenarios of disabilities that create enabling and disabling (dis/abling) practices. Drawing on qualitative empirical data the societal visibility and relevance of dis/abling practices are analyzed by connecting disability studies and sociological ideas with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). The essay explores how (visual) dis/ability is the outcome of human and non-human configurations and suggests that dis/ability can be understood neither as an individual bodily impairment nor as a socially attributed disability. Rather, dis/ability refers to complex sets of heterogeneous practices that (re-)associate bodies, material objects, and technologies with sensory practices. These practices, the paper concludes, draw attention to the multiple processes that (re-) concatenate the conduct of human affairs.

Keywords

EN

dis/ability; sensory practices; vision; blindness; money

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 195-208

Dates

published

2007-12-01

online

2007-12-17

Contributors

author

Michael Schillmeier

• Department of Sociology, LMU Munich, Konradstr. 10a 80801 Munich Germany

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-007-0017-6