First off, a qualifier…connectivity is a complex subject. It would be very hard to sum it up in a few hundred words. My task here is to outline how I understand it in a way that brings other people in to the discussion. Apologies if this explanation misses the mark for you…by all means feel free to offer up your own interpretations in the comments box below.
Having argued in the last post that the two prevailing models of disability (the medical and social) rely on the idea that the disabled person is ‘other,’ connectivity is striking because it states that we are all dependent on mediating technologies to be ourselves, and so challenges the assumption that we can separate people on the basis of their ability, mental or physical acuity, age, gender, ethnicity, or any of the other normative judgements we make about people.
It asks how are people connected to their world – how do all of us use mediating technologies to engage in our lives. (Again, it’s important to emphasize here that we’re not just talking about ‘technologies’ as mobile phones and wheelchairs, but a host of other elements in the world that we engage with: people, animals, tools, equipment, etc., are all mediating technologies).
Connectivity makes no normative judgement about the technology or the person using it. So a shepherd who uses a sheep dog to herd sheep is seen no differently to a blind person uses a guide dog. Both use mediating technologies (the dog, commands, instructions and gestures, etc.) to engage meaningfully with the world.
In the medical world, the person with the guide dog is considered disabled because of their visual impairment, and normative judgements are leveled against the disabled person on the basis of their presumed ability, social value (and cost), rights and responsibilities. Connectivity argues that this is wrong – that it is an arbitrary judgement based on medical and social discourses of disability and, in fact, people’s use of technology makes us more alike than some would have us believe.
Connectivity could be an important new way to explore how we understand the world, our abilities, the way we codify disability, movement and function, and so could be a powerful tool for physiotherapists as advocates and critical voices in health care. It challenges traditional ways of thinking about disability. It radically opposes the medicalization of disability in things like the ICF, and confronts people’s stigmatizing attitudes towards ability. It subverts the social model’s assertion that disabled people need to be seen as different in order that we can advocate for them, and asks how we all rely – to some extent – on mediating technologies to engage meaningfully in the world.
In connectivity, the role for the physiotherapist changes, from one that perpetually tries to locate abnormality and difference (and for a powerful critique of this, see Swain, French and Cameron (2003)), to something quite different, and in tomorrow’s post, I’ll discuss some of the ways that the idea of connectivity might have a direct impact on physiotherapy thinking and practise.
In the meantime, if you have any better explanations for these ideas, know of good resources and want to add comments that we might use in our paper, add them in the comments box below.Further readings
Swain, J., French, S. & Cameron, C. (2003). Practice: Are Professionals Parasites? In, Controversial Issues in a Disabling Society. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Papadimitrioua, C. (2008). Becoming en‐wheeled: the situated accomplishment of re‐embodiment as a wheelchair user after spinal cord injury. Disability & Society, 23(7), pp.691-704. DOI:10.1080/09687590802469420.
I am enjoying reading about this concept of connectivity and use of mediating technologies. I am not sure if it helps to add some (inexpert and incomplete) thoughts from my own experiences but here we go!
While I hadn’t come across this concept before the initial blog post and then reading Barbara’s article, I think I have intuitively been using elements of this concept in some work I have been doing with students about ‘obesity’. I don’t view large bodies as ‘other’ so have difficulty working with graphs and tables that divide up our body weight/BMI into categories with names and calling equipment that is larger (than what is currently deemed normal) names such as ‘bariatic’. Of course it makes sense to have something for everyone to sit on (for eg) that feels comfortable and isn’t going to break; but why do we create an arbitrary distinction of ‘bariatric equipment’ when it is all the same stuff, just in different sizes? People may well be growing – just look at the height of doors in 400 year old houses. Thus we probably need to often rethink chair (etc) sizes as we continue to grow (and live longer). This is how/who we are for now. Just because we were/are not always this way doesn’t mean this should be defined as pathology to be fixed.
Connectivity is particularly salient within fat studies at the moment as ‘obesity’ has only last year been classified as a disease in the US and there has been much discussion about whether it also should be classified as a ‘disability’. Some social arguments contend that this type of othering will help reduce the stigma that comes from assigning fatness to individual responsibility. Connectivity sidesteps this whole issue.
PS: who said academic writing cant be creative – some sections of Disability, Connectivity and Transgressing the Autonomous Body were just beautiful Barbara Gibson!
Enjoying learning about this idea which I have never conceptualised before. Presumably when extrapolated we all become ‘disabled’ in some way? For example, colleagues without the confidence to tweet or ‘link-in / facebook’ become network disabled. Living in a very rural community, reliance on my car or bicycle to reach local amenities makes me geographically disabled. Ignorance or apathy regarding casting a vote makes one politically disabled. Or rather, not disabled, but just with a different view and perspective on life and its demands. Which brings me back to connectivity being a very inclusive model of how everyone views the other in any situation. But on the other hand, surely the above examples are arguably choices made by individuals regarding the way they connect with the world whereas many people who have medical, physical, or physiological differences have less choice and are forced by circumstance into connecting differently? Does that matter? That is where my current thread ends – will top up the caffeine / cake and think on.
Hi Dave RE post #2. I think you’ve done a lovely job of making the notion of connectivity accessible. I am hoping that as a critical group we can use this as a point of departure to delve a little more into the philosophical approach(es) that underpin these ideas. In particular, drawing out the relational nature of connectivity and extending the elements beyond people and things to include emotions, places etc. and to explore how “people” are also connectivities in themselves (and constantly changing). Here is how I described it in a recent paper that might help. (I use the term assemblages but I think they are parallel concepts). Let me know if you think its useful: The notion of ‘assemblages’ that I further explore below, comes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari who describe collections of heterogenous elements that in coming together produce particular effects. For my purposes here, the primary elements of interest are bodies, identities, technologies, and places, but assemblages can include an endless variety of elements from physical objects to events to utterances. Importantly, assemblages are not stable or closed systems, but rather temporary connections that continually come together and then break apart, forming different assemblages with other elements that produce different effects. For example, assemblages formed between bodies, wheelchairs, and places are not permanent states, but temporary connections that enable certain actions and activities and constrain others. To refer to a person as ‘wheelchair- dependant’ carries with it stable notions of ability and disability that belie the myriad possibilities of a body-wheelchair-place assemblage. A wheelchair can provide significant advantages in one time/place, i.e. making movement easier or faster, and disadvantages in others, if movement is limited by stairs, for example. Thus talk of dependence and disability becomes reconfigured as moments of possibility realized through multiple temporary assemblages . Gibson BE. Parallels and problems of normalization in rehabilitation and universal design: enabling connectivities. Disability and Rehabilitation. 2014 Mar;36(16):1328-33. http://informahealthcare.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/09638288.2014.891661
Originally posted by Barbara Gibson on 25th October 2014