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Establishing a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue, this text engages with the typically disparate fields of social gerontology and disability studies. It investigates the subjective experiences of two groups rarely considered together in research – people ageing with long-standing disability and people first experiencing disability with ageing.
This book challenges assumptions about impairment in later life and the residual nature of the ‘fourth age’. It proposes that the experience of ‘disability’ in older age reaches beyond the bodily context and can involve not only a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life, but also ongoing efforts in response.
Introduction Disability is often understood within models that define it, shape self-identities and determine which professions engage (Smart, 2009 ). With a view to clarifying concepts at the outset, I discuss in this chapter how disability is understood. The chapter expands on one of the paradoxes identified in Chapter 1: how separate models are used to understand what disability is generally and to understand what it is in older age. First, I consider understandings within approaches to disability generally – involving two key models: social and
Introduction This chapter expands on the engagement with scholarship started in the previous two chapters. It engages with one of the paradoxes highlighted in Chapter 1: that there are only separate theories on ageing and on disability, impacting on our ability to conceptualise relationships between the two (Murphy et al, 2007 ). I compare key theoretical perspectives on disability and on ageing, engaging especially with critical or cultural studies, and also consider other areas of scholarship where theorising on disability and ageing could meet. The
medical processes) of first experiencing disability with ageing differ from those of ageing with disability?’ I start by briefly considering heterogeneity in the AwithD group and then introduce approaches to comparison between these two experiences. The main part of this chapter uses as subheadings the subjects of each of the three previous chapters – disabling bodies, disabling or enabling contexts, and responding to challenges – and, of necessity, repeats some of the discussion of those chapters. Both groups could perceive themselves as disabled by their bodies and
Introduction Public policies frame how societies provide care and support in practice, influence a sense of identity, and shape perceptions of what categories we belong to as individuals. They offer a window on how society conceives of disability for younger and older persons (Kahana and Kahana, 2017 : 181). In this chapter, I engage with the separation of public policy frameworks on ageing and disability, and the consequences for older people, focusing on social care. I first introduce how public policies traditionally underscore difference between people
117 8 Meta-narratives of disability1 Authored with Mary-Dan Johnston In his book of the same title, Marshall Gregory discusses how we are shaped by stories. For Gregory, what is at stake in the stories that we hear is the way stories construct the world, the way stories invite responses and the way that stories exert shaping pressure, because ‘both the “knowledge” offered by stories and our seldom denied responses constitute kinds of practice, modes of clarification and sets of habits for living that, once configured and repeatedly reinforced, accompany us
Nearly 20% of the population has a disability. Despite this, mainstream research often does not explicitly address the methodological and practical issues that can act as barriers to disabled people’s participation in social research. In this book, Aidley and Fearon provide a concise, practical introduction to making it easier for everyone to take part in research.
Requiring no prior knowledge about accessible research methods, the book:
• explains how removing barriers to participation will improve the quality of the research;
• covers the research process from design, to collecting data, to dissemination and publication;
• includes checklists and further reading, as well as useful examples and vignettes to illustrate how issues play out in practice.
This book will be invaluable to researchers from a variety of backgrounds looking to increase participation in their research, whether postgraduate students, experienced academic researchers, practitioners or professionals.
, disability and infirmity form rather more contingent sources of social division in part because of the temporal flux within which they emerge. There is a distinction, for example, between the predictable status of becoming aged and the less predictable status of becoming disabled, ill or infirm. Most people see bodily change as constituting the ‘authentic’ basis of age and ageing; reminders of the inevitable temporality that is attached to identity, location and status. Those changes that are evidenced by the ageing body, which do not reflect illness or impairment, best
51 5 Social policy and disability Colin Cameron In this chapter I will explore the relationship between social policy and the experience of disability, drawing on perspectives developed by disabled people and using the UK as a case study. I will look at contested meanings of both terms, social policy and disability, and develop an argument suggesting that social policy has largely constructed disability as dependency. I conclude that the aspiration to equality for disabled people remains one which requires continued struggle and that progressive intentions
Much of the conceptual architecture of the chapter on physical disability ( Chapter 6 ) is relevant to this chapter on intellectual disabilities: intersectional subjectivities; the impairment/disability dichotomy; the social construction of disability; the heteronormative and genito-centric conception of sexual intimacy; the radicalism of crip/queer theorising; and the necessity of critical deconstructions of normative and normalising discourses that produce desexualising impacts upon disabled people. Similarly, there are important issues to explore at policy
