SOC 313 Final Project

In this podcast episode, the host explores the concept of disability and its dimensions. They discuss the limitations of the medical model of disability and the importance of embracing the social model. They also talk about the strengths-based approach in social work and the assessments conducted to understand the unique needs of individuals with disabilities. The host emphasizes the role of advocacy in protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities and promoting social justice. They then delve into the spectrum of disability, highlighting the diverse manifestations and types of disabilities. The host shares personal experiences working with clients with disabilities and the various challenges they face. They also touch on the social and cultural aspects of disability and the barriers that individuals with disabilities encounter. The podcast ends with a mention of intersectionality and disability. Welcome to Inclusive Conversations, where we explore the diverse experiences, perspectives, and voices that shape our understanding of inclusivity. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions in the pursuit of a more inclusive world. Whether it's challenging societal norms or celebrating the beauty of diversity, we invite you to join the conversation as we strive to foster understanding, empathy, and unity. Here's your host, Ramsey Hagan. Hi, and welcome to the first ever episode of Inclusive Conversations. Today we're going to be exploring the multifaceted concept of disability and unraveling its many dimensions. I'm Ramsey, and in this 15-minute journey, we'll delve into one question. What is disability? Before we jump into the main focus of this podcast, which is answering the question, what is disability? I feel it's important that I analyze my personal understanding of disability prior to taking St. Effect's sociology course, SOCH 313, Conceptions of Disability. As a social worker, I feel I was quite well-equipped to answer this question even before taking St. Effect's sociology course. Social work has allowed me to recognize the limitations of the medical model of disability, which views disability primarily as a medical condition or individual impairment. Instead, as social workers, we choose to embrace the social model, which acknowledges that disability is not solely determined by physical or mental limitations, but it's also shaped by social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors. The social model helps to highlight the importance of addressing barriers and promoting inclusivity and inclusion to enhance the quality of life for people with disabilities. Social work has taught me to adopt a strengths-based approach to my clients with disability, as it allows me to focus on their abilities and talents and resources, rather than solely on their deficits or limitations. We work with our clients to identify their strengths and build on them to achieve goals and maximize potential. This approach empowers our clients with disabilities to actively participate in decision-making and problem-solving related to their lives. Social workers also conduct assessments to understand the unique needs and challenges faced by individuals with disabilities. This assessment encompasses not only physical and mental considerations, but also factors such as social support networks, housing stability, financial resources, access to education and employment opportunities, and participation in community life. By taking a comprehensive view of our clients' lives, we can develop personalized intervention plans that address their diverse needs and promote holistic well-being. Another huge part of my job is advocating for individuals with disabilities. I work to protect their rights, promote social justice, and remove barriers to equal participation in society. We advocate for accessible environments, inclusive policies and practices, and the elimination of discrimination and stigma associated with disability. We aim to empower our clients to advocate for themselves, providing them with knowledge, skills, and support needed to assert their rights and navigate systems of care and support. I feel really fortunate to have worked in this industry, as I think it's given me a really well-rounded understanding of society and disability. But I think this course has also expanded my horizons and my understanding of disability even more. Now, let's jump right into the main focus of this podcast, which is answering the question, what is disability, after having taken SOCH 313, Conceptions of Disability? Let's start by breaking down the concept of disability. According to the World Health Organization, disability isn't just about physical or mental impairments, but also about the barriers in society that prevent full participation and inclusion. An estimated 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the global population, experience a significant disability today. I find that statistic to be absolutely staggering, and truly emphasizes how important it is that we achieve an inclusive society. I'd love to be able to sit here and give you a concise, one-line definition, what is disability, to be able to wrap the podcast up a lot faster. But the problem with that is that disability studies recognizes that the term disability and disability itself is not an object to be studied. In fact, it doesn't seek to define disability in any medical way, or any way at all. This is because disability studies understand that disability is connected to culture and society. To explain this better, essentially, disability can't exist without the socially and culturally constructed concept of normalcy. In a truly inclusive society, we wouldn't have the disabled and the abled. We would have one people. It's the sense that this person is able-bodied and free of physical impairments that then leaves the flip side of the coin, or this sense of the other, the disabled. But in reality, we're all one people, and that's what disability studies recognizes. This is a concept that we studied quite in depth in lesson one of this course, in a paper by Rod McAlko, which was published in 2022. Exploring the idea that disability is not solely about impairment, but rather about the barriers in society that prevent full participation and inclusion, is the bread and butter of the field of disability studies and this podcast. In the next segment, we're going to jump right into the spectrum of disability and trying to grasp a better understanding of it. In this next segment, we're going to try and grasp a better understanding of the spectrum of disability. I think a really good analogy to try and explain the spectrum of disability is to think about a light bulb. Disability isn't a light bulb. It's not either on or off. There's a lot of middle ground. There's a lot of causal factors for symptoms. There's a lot of different levels of severity. So I think just picture that light bulb when you think about disability. It's not on or off. There's a lot of room in the middle, right? There's a lot of different circumstances, a lot of different forms of disability. So that's a really good way to kind of illustrate disability. I'd like to reference an article by Dr. Shapiro and his associates. He is a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And I think he does a really good job of helping to further expand on this idea that disability is a spectrum. He describes how disabilities encompass a diverse group of interrelated disorders with multiple manifestations resulting from brain dysfunction, motor disability of varying severity. I found his article to be really educational, and it kind of helps to emphasize that the various types of disabilities can manifest as either physical, sensory, cognitive, mental health disabilities, and even invisible disabilities, which are the most difficult to recognize. But they're equally as serious and can have consequences that are just as severe as disabilities that are readily apparent. Now, in my time as a social worker, I feel I've really had the opportunity to see the spectrum of disability right in front of me. I work with a handful of different clients, and a handful is probably an understatement. I work with probably close to 20 to 25 different clients throughout a year. And they range from young children to elderly folks. And I see disability manifest itself in numerous different ways. For example, I have a client, obviously I'm not going to give away any names or any personal information for confidentiality and privacy reasons, but I have a young man who is my client who suffers from quite severe cerebral palsy, and it affects his ability to speak. He has very slurred speech, which after some time, you're able to interpret and understand what he's saying, but obviously that requires some conscious effort and a willingness to get to know the person and really understand speech patterns and that kind of thing. Not to mention his numerous different physical impairments, his motor skills are quite poor, his mobility is poor, and the fact that he suffers from constant pain. Actually one of the surgeries to correct and kind of straighten out the body after a child is born with cerebral palsy is to fuse a metal rod to their spine, and the amount of pain that that causes is just terrible, but unfortunately it's one of the better forms of treatment. And the symptoms that I just mentioned don't even begin to cover the social aspect, and the social kind of exclusion that he suffers due to his cerebral palsy. Now like I mentioned, he has kind of quite slurred speech, which affects his ability to form relationships with his peers and to make friends. In my experience, people have been quite kind and they're always very friendly towards him, but it does make it quite difficult for strangers to communicate with him. And obviously there's kind of different routes that we can take to improve how he communicates, like using text-to-speech and typing out what he wants to say, but all those things take time and it kind of harms that real-life, real-time interaction, right? Another thing is he loves to be outside, and like I said, he's got quite poor mobility and his footing is quite poor, and so in the summer he loves to go fishing, but you'd be surprised how few accessible areas there are near water for us to fish. So it's all these little barriers as well. It's not just the readily apparent symptoms and the physical symptoms, but also the social aspects and the cultural aspects of disability. Now as much as I'd love to keep giving you more examples of my different cases and the spectrum of disability, this is supposed to be a 15-minute podcast, so I'll be with you in the next segment, which covers intersectionality and disability. All right, welcome back. Hopefully you grabbed a coffee or had a bathroom break or whatever you needed to do, because we're going to hop into our third segment of this podcast, which is intersectionality and disability. We did quite an in-depth review of intersectionality and disability in Lesson 10 of our course, and I'd like to specifically refer to a paper by Kimberly Crenshaw, who is an African-American woman and a legal scholar. And I'd just like to clarify that I only find it pertinent to mention that she's both a woman and a person of color because it helps to understand the unique insight she would have, being both a minority and a woman, as they typically suffer much more oppression than your average, I guess, white male would. This is because intersectionality is a way of understanding social relations, and it acknowledges that social systems are complicated and that factors like racism, sexism, sexuality and socioeconomic status can all be present and active at the same time in a person's life. So they can essentially combine and compound and transform that person's experience of oppression. So Kimberly Crenshaw, for example, as a woman and an African-American, she deals with both sexism and racism, and that kind of transforms her experience. To give a better understanding, a better explanation of this, Crenshaw kind of felt that anti-racist movements and feminist movements were both kind of overlooking unique challenges of a person who shares both of those qualities. So essentially, legislation that was formed to protect black men overlooked black women, and legislation about sexism was understood to protect white women, so it overlooked black women. So it's this idea that combining racism and sexism together doesn't protect black women at all. And so the same can be said about persons with disabilities. This really highlights the importance of recognizing and addressing these intersections in disability and advocacy and policymaking, because it leaves a whole group completely in the lurch, a whole group who is not protected by these regulations or policies. Furthermore, intersecting identities influence experiences of disability and their access to resources and support. So to kind of give a better, or I guess a real-world example of this, a lot of my clients are below what you'd consider being middle class. They suffer financially, they're of low socioeconomic status, and that affects their access to resources and support constantly. As we all know, rural New Brunswick is a very, very difficult place to be if there's no public transportation, and so you're reliant on having your own vehicle, you're reliant on having the money to put fuel in your car, because you can't walk to these places. Or say you have cerebral palsy and you have impaired mobility, then you kind of have this intersecting of experiences where you suffer economically or you suffer financially, and you suffer physically, and you just can't go anywhere, you can't seek the support you need, you can't get to the hospital, you can't get to see your doctor, right? So it's this really terrible compounding of different experiences. Another example of this is children with disabilities in education who are separated from their class and taught separately. And obviously there are valid reasons to do this, they learn at maybe a slower pace, they could potentially be a distraction for the rest of the class, but it really does create this sense of the other, and it kind of isolates them from their peers. In a paper by Reeves and colleagues in 2020, they do a really great job of expanding on this idea and helping to emphasize the effects of intersectionality. Just to give one more quick example of intersectionality and disability, I want to reference a paper by Tracy Edlist, which was published in 2022, and discusses deafness in early childhood diagnostic and intervention practices. This chapter demonstrates how Ontario's infant hearing program capitalizes on parents' concerns about their child's deafness to lead parents towards spoken language as the only right choice for their child. This can have some really harmful effects, as essentially the messaging that these parents are receiving, it makes deafness disappear, even in its appearance, which is another example of how rehabilitation attempts to remove any local knowledge of disability. As we wrap up the podcast, join me in the last segment, which discusses the changing perceptions and language in relation to disability. We're just going to briefly discuss the changing language and perceptions towards disability in this last segment, and I'm going to reference a paper published in 2022 by Dana Dunn, which discusses changing attitudes towards disability. Now, in the past, we've often viewed disability through a lens of pity or charity or medical pathology, and these people were marginalized and segregated and institutionalized, and this left little consideration for their rights and their autonomy and their dignity, which is a huge, huge problem. Language is a great way to kind of illustrate and reflect the paternalistic attitudes, using terms like crippled, invalid, or handicapped, and they're kind of derogatory or dehumanizing in a sense. Fortunately, the rise of the disability rights movement in the 20th century marked a significant turning point in how disability was perceived and discussed. It kind of drew on inspiration from other civil rights movements, and activists challenged the status quo, demanding that there was recognition and equality and inclusion, which was really a huge moment in history. These people rejected the notion that disability was a personal tragedy or a defect, and they instead sought to frame it as a social and political issue that was rooted in discrimination and systematic barriers. Now, one of the first key developments in language surrounding disability was the adoption of first-person language, which essentially, instead of saying a disabled person, it encourages saying something like a person with disability, and that linguistic shift kind of aims to prioritize the individual over their disability, but the problem with that is even using the term person with a disability, you're still separating them from society. You're still creating the sense of the other. They're not a person with a disability. They're a person, right? There's no need to highlight them or identify them by one characteristic that they might have. Tchaikovsky does a really great job of explaining this, for example, by using terms like we to discuss the party that you share, so myself, I'm an able-bodied person. If I were to talk about we referring to the able-bodied and them in reference to a disabled person, it really does, it has this segregatory effect, which is just so harmful. On a more hopeful note, though, I think this changing of language and perceptions of disability, it reflects a broader shift towards recognizing and respecting the rights and the dignity and humanity of individuals with disabilities, and it's definitely a step in the right direction towards a truly inclusive society. Now, as we wrap things up, I want to, first of all, thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, but I also want you to remember that disability is not a static or homogenous concept, it's a dynamic and multifaceted aspect of human diversity that deserves understanding, respect, and inclusion. I encourage you to continue exploring the topic of disability and challenging your own assumptions and biases, and if you're out there, advocate for more inclusivity in society. You can play a huge part. You're instrumental to change. So thank you again for joining us on this journey of discovery. Until next time, this is Inclusive Conversations. Stay curious and compassionate. Peace out.