http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

4. UNHCR notes with concern that although the country acceded to the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol in 1999, incorporation of the 1951 Convention obligations into national legislation and normative acts has been slow and to date Kazakhstan has failed to comply with its obligation to give full effect to the Covenant in the domestic legal order, inter alia providing for effective judicial and other remedies for violations of these rights

United Nations High Commission for Refugees

Rabelais and His World.

In recent decades, struggles for recognition have increasingly dominated the political landscape.1 Recognition theorists such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1995) seek to interpret and justify these struggles through the idea that our identity is shaped, at least partly, by our relations with other people. Because our identity is shaped in this way, it is alleged that feelings of self-worth, self-respect and self-esteem are possible only if we are positively recognised for who we are. Consequently, for many political theorists, recognition is an integral component of a satisfactory modern theory of justice, as well as the means by which both historical and contemporary political struggles can be understood and justified.

The Politics of Recognition

The social model of disability and the disappearing body

What is the case for and how would one begin to construct a sociology of impairment? This paper argues that the realignment of the disability/impairment distinction is vital for the identity politics of the disability movement. The body is at the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate, yet the social model of disability makes it an exile. The transformation of the body from a reactionary to an emancipatory concept implies a sociology of impairment. This paper explores the contribution that post-structuralism and phenomenology might make to this end.

The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a sociology of impairment

This paper is an attempt to develop a sociology of impairment and to theorise embodiment in the lebenswelt. Disability studies has failed to address adequately the fundamental issue of bodily agency. The impaired body is represented as a passive recipient of social forces. Such a conception of the body is losing ground within social theory. This paper attempts to overcome disability studies' disembodied view of disability by utilising a phenomenological concept of embodiment. Phenomenology offers the opportunity to transcend the traditional Cartesian dualisms which posit the body as a passive precultural object. However, such a view, when extended to impairment is empty of political content since phenomenological analyses have relied upon medicalised and individualised understandings of disability. In order to counter the disablism evident in phenomenology on the one side and disability studies' disembodied view of disability on the other, we argue for a radical phenomenological approach to the (impaired)...

Disability Studies and Phenomenology: The carnal politics of everyday life

Impairment has been set aside in debates about disability dominated by the social model. This paper seeks to go beyond the Cartesianism which produces this neglect. It suggests that radical disability studies can prosper from a critique of modernity which entails a shift from its singular epistemological origins in the critique of capitalism. The argument challenges the contention that the oppression of disabled people is reducible to social restrictions which are the outcome of a set of structural determinations. It suggests that the oppression of disabled people is also umbilically linked to the visual constitution of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity. The vision of modernity is impaired by the assumption that to see is to know, that is, by its ocularcentrism. In deconstructing the visual culture of modernity, it is possible to demonstrate that the non-disabled gaze is a product of this specific way of seeing which actually constructs the world that it claims to discover. Using the work of Sa...

The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the aesthetic of oppression

The Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) and the Feminist Movement appeal to incompatible meanings of ‘care’. For the DPM the word ‘care’ is to be resisted. The emotional connotations implicit in the c...

Bill Hughes

Papers

The social model of disability and the disappearing body

The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a sociology of impairment

Disability Studies and Phenomenology: The carnal politics of everyday life

The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the aesthetic of oppression

Love’s Labours Lost? Feminism, the Disabled People’s Movement and an Ethic of Care