disability leads to invention essay

Disability is not an obstacle to success. These inspirational leaders prove that

These leaders show that disability is no barrier to achieving incredible things Image:  REUTERS/Murad Sezer

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“Disability need not be an obstacle to success,” Stephen Hawking wrote in the first ever world disability report back in 2011. As one of the most influential scientists of modern times, the wheelchair-bound physicist is certainly proof of that.

So why then are public attitudes so far from the reality? Almost 40% of respondents in a survey in Britain said that disabled people aren’t as productive as others. In the same survey, a quarter of disabled people said people expected less of them because of their disability.

It is these sorts of attitudes, rather than any mental or physical impairment, that create barriers for people with disabilities. As these leaders from the world of sports, culture and business show, it’s about time we changed those outdated beliefs.

“I went blind at 22. From an athlete, I became a young man with a white cane, unsure how to live my life,” Mark Pollock, a Forum Young Global Leader explains. But very soon, he found a deeper purpose in life, and realized his disability didn’t have to stop him from achieving great things.

“I began to race in deserts, mountains, across oceans, and on the 10th anniversary of going blind, I raced over 43 days to the South Pole.”

But in 2010, an accident left him paralyzed, and once again his world changed overnight: “My new life was shattered.”

He had a choice: to let his disability define him for the rest of his life, or to continue fighting. There was only ever one way it was going to go.

“If I just sat in a wheelchair, I’d be giving up completely,” he remembers. Today, he’s working with other leaders from science, technology and communications to fund and fast-track a cure for paralysis.

Born in the US in 1880, an illness left Helen Keller both blind and deaf before her second birthday. While the services available to people with disabilities were less extensive than they are today, Keller’s mother sought out experts and ensured her daughter received the best education.

In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe College, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts. It was at university that her career as a writer and social activist started. Today, the Helen Keller archives contain almost 500 speeches and essays on topics as varied as birth control and Fascism in Europe.

She would go on to achieve international acclaim, becoming America’s first Goodwill Ambassador, and to this day she remains an inspiration to the deaf and blind .

Ralph Braun was still a young boy when he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, an incurable group of genetic diseases that leads to a loss of muscle mass.

A few years after his diagnosis, Ralph began to lose his ability to walk. While doctors warned him he would never be able to lead an independent life, the young boy was already proving people wrong, building the first battery-powered scooter. His passion would eventually lead him to establish wheelchair manufacturer BraunAbility.

He died in 2013, but as his company’s website notes, his legacy lives on. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and Ralph’s physical limitations only served to fuel his determination to live independently and prove to society that people with physical disabilities can participate fully and actively in life.”

Mexico’s most famous artist was born with spina bifida, a condition that can cause defects in the spinal cord. At six, she contracted polio, which left one leg much thinner than the other.

In spite of these challenges, she was an active child, but at 18 a bus accident left her with serious injuries. It was while recovering from the accident that Frida discovered her love of painting. She would go on to be one of the most famous Surrealists in the world.

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Disability as the Driver of Innovation

There are many issues with how our society views people with disabilities and one of the most fundamental ones is that we approach disability as a matter of charity. People with disabilities are often labeled “unfortunate” and regarded as the targets of much-needed generosity by those who can provide help and solutions. But the fact of the matter is that people with disabilities have historically been—and still are—on the forefront of finding solutions for themselves. It’s time we begin viewing the disability community as a community of innovators.

There is perhaps no better person I could have spoken with on this topic than Haben Girma, the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School. She is a disability and inclusion consultant and in-between writing her first book (a memoir) and giving several key note speeches on technology and inclusion, she took the time to chat with me about innovation.

“People love dreaming of ‘bigger and better.’ There is always the dream of making better things that make our lives even easier,” says Girma. However while that is an admirable driver toward the invention of something new, Girma cautions that there are often limits: “When people dream, it’s usually just a dream for themselves. If a white non-disabled male dreams of one day having an autonomous car, his dream likely focuses on cars for people just like him. Autonomous cars would be amazing for people with disabilities. But are the designers dreaming of disabled drivers? Will they design a vehicle that will accommodate wheelchair users? Would the controls be accessible to blind people?”

In other words, if designers don’t recognize a problem because they personally don’t happen to have encountered them, they will likely not solve for that problem. This simple reality is often why so many of our most cherished and ground-breaking inventions have come from the disability community. If you inhabit a world that was not built to suit you—as the disability community does—you are of course much more likely to improve upon it. Girma offers the example of the typewriter. In 1808 Pellegrino Turri built the first functioning typewriter and invented carbon paper to go with it. Why? Because he was in love with a blind woman and wanted her to be able to write him letters directly rather than having them dictated to someone. Over 200 years later, I don’t think I can overstate the importance of that invention as I write this via a keyboard, arguably the grandchild of the typewriter.

“This is just one story, and no one knows this story,” says Girma. “What of all the other disability stories?” It truly matters that essentially no one is familiar with this story. We live in a culture that celebrates innovators, but yet we somehow fail to acknowledge the role the disability community plays in the existence of so many inventions we take for granted. Girma offers another example: email. The first email protocols were programmed by Vint Cerf in 1972 as a way to easily communicate with his wife—who was Deaf—while he was at work.

For Girma the key takeaway from these disability-origin stories of some of our favorite technologies is that the products don’t only benefit the disability community. “Captions on videos help Deaf people, but they also help hearing people, too,” she says. “In fact, Facebook reported that adding captions to videos increases the average view time by about 12%.” Technology is also of course not the only realm of innovation, as Girma notes: “curb cuts were designed for [wheel]chair users. So many non-disabled users love this invention, though: parents with strollers, travelers with luggage, kids on scooters, skates, bikes, etc.” She also adds that disability also drove some of our most fundamental intellectual discoveries: “Charles Darwin said that his illness actually led to his theories on evolution. If he wasn’t forced to stay home due to his illness, he may not have had time to develop his theories.” And then there is also TOM, some of the most prominent and impactful inventors of our time who use disability to drive their innovation. Because of this universal benefit, Girma argues that all innovators—even those who do not have a disability themselves—need to design for universal accessibility and with all kinds of people in mind. She gave a speech on the topic at Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

It is time that we start seeing the disability community as a group of people who has not just fully contributed to our civilization as we know it, but has been on the forefront, leading with the kinds of life-improving inventions some of us wouldn’t even dream of. “The dominant disability story in our society is that disability is a burden,” says Girma. “Spotlighting how disability drives innovation will change the dominant disability story to a positive one: difference is an asset.”

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An Essay on Modeling: The Social Model of Disability

• First Online: 01 January 2009

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From its first exposition almost half a century ago, the social model of disability has been aimed at altering both theory and practice, bringing about profound changes in people’s understanding of disability, and in the daily lives of disabled people as well. The social model’s foil, and on some accounts its antithesis, is the medical model of disability. Both models treat disability as a locus of difficulties. While the medical model takes disability to be a problem requiring medical intervention—and as both the prerogative and the responsibility of medical professionals to fix—the social model understands disability as a political problem calling for corrective action by citizen activists who alter other people’s attitudes and reform the practices of the state. These two conceptualizations of disability have been treated as competitors, as if one must prevail over and eradicate the other in thinking about who disabled people are and what should be said and done in regard to them.

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Silvers, A. (2009). An Essay on Modeling: The Social Model of Disability. In: Ralston, D., Ho, J. (eds) Philosophical Reflections on Disability. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 104. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2477-0_2

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Book Reviews

In 2 essay collections, writers with disabilities tell their own stories.

Ilana Masad

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More than 1 in 5 people living in the U.S. has a disability, making it the largest minority group in the country.

Despite the civil rights law that makes it illegal to discriminate against a person based on disability status — Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990 — only 40 percent of disabled adults in what the Brookings Institute calls "prime working age," that is 25-54, are employed. That percentage is almost doubled for non-disabled adults of the same age. But even beyond the workforce — which tends to be the prime category according to which we define useful citizenship in the U.S. — the fact is that people with disabilities (or who are disabled — the language is, for some, interchangeable, while others have strong rhetorical and political preferences), experience a whole host of societal stigmas that range from pity to disbelief to mockery to infantilization to fetishization to forced sterilization and more.

But disabled people have always existed, and in two recent essay anthologies, writers with disabilities prove that it is the reactions, attitudes, and systems of our society which are harmful, far more than anything their own bodies throw at them.

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, collects around 60 essays from the column, which began in 2016, and divides them into eight self-explanatory sections: Justice, Belonging, Working, Navigating, Coping, Love, Family, and Joy. The title, which comes from the 1990s disability rights activist slogan "Nothing about us without us," explains the book's purpose: to give those with disabilities the platform and space to write about their own experiences rather than be written about.

While uniformly brief, the essays vary widely in terms of tone and topic. Some pieces examine particular historical horrors in which disability was equated with inhumanity, like the "The Nazis' First Victims Were the Disabled" by Kenny Fries (the title says it all) or "Where All Bodies Are Exquisite" by Riva Lehrer, in which Lehrer, who was born with spina bifida in 1958, "just as surgeons found a way to close the spina bifida lesion," visits the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. There, she writes:

"I am confronted with a large case full of specimen jars. Each jar contains a late-term fetus, and all of the fetuses have the same disability: Their spinal column failed to fuse all the way around their spinal cord, leaving holes (called lesions) in their spine. [...] I stand in front of these tiny humans and try not to pass out. I have never seen what I looked like on the day I was born."

Later, she adds, "I could easily have ended up as a teaching specimen in a jar. But luck gave me a surgeon."

Other essays express the joys to be found in experiences unfamiliar to non-disabled people, such as the pair of essays by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison in which the two writers and friends describe the comfort and intimacy between them because of shared — if different — experiences; Brown writes at the end of her piece:

"We're talking about our bodies, and then not about our bodies, about her dog, and my classes, and the zip line we'd like to string between us [... a]nd then we're talking about our bodies again, that sense of being both separate and not separate from the skin we're in. And it hits me all at once that none of this is in translation, none of this is explaining. "

From the cover of Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People, edited by Alice Wong Disability Visibility Project hide caption

From the cover of Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People, edited by Alice Wong

While there's something of value in each of these essays, partially because they don't toe to a single party line but rather explore the nuances of various disabilities, there's an unfortunate dearth of writers with intellectual disabilities in this collection. I also noticed that certain sections focused more on people who've acquired a disability during their lifetime and thus went through a process of mourning, coming to terms with, or overcoming their new conditions. While it's true — and emphasized more than once — that many of us, as we age, will become disabled, the process of normalization must begin far earlier if we're to become a society that doesn't discriminate against or segregate people with disabilities.

One of the contributors to About Us, disability activist and writer Alice Wong, edited and published another anthology just last year, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People , through the Disability Visibility Project which publishes and supports disability media and is partnered with StoryCorps. The e-book, which is available in various accessible formats, features 17 physically and/or intellectually disabled writers considering the ways in which resistance and hope intersect. And they do — and must, many of these writers argue — intersect, for without a hope for a better future, there would be no point to such resistance. Attorney and disability justice activist Shain M. Neumeir writes:

"Those us who've chosen a life of advocacy and activism aren't hiding from the world in a bubble as the alt-right and many others accuse us of doing. Anything but. Instead, we've chosen to go back into the fires that forged us, again and again, to pull the rest of us out, and to eventually put the fires out altogether."

You don't go back into a burning building unless you hope to find someone inside that is still alive.

The anthology covers a range of topics: There are clear and necessary explainers — like disability justice advocate and organizer Lydia X. Z. Brown's "Rebel — Don't Be Palatable: Resisting Co-optation and Fighting for the World We Want" — about what disability justice means, how we work towards it, and where such movements must resist both the pressures of systemic attacks (such as the threatened cuts to coverage expanded by the Affordable Care Act) and internal gatekeeping and horizontal oppression (such as a community member being silenced due to an unpopular or uninformed opinion). There are essays that involve the work of teaching towards a better future, such as community lawyer Talila A. Lewis's "the birth of resistance: courageous dreams, powerful nobodies & revolutionary madness" which opens with a creative classroom writing prompt: "The year is 2050. There are no prisons. What does justice look like?" And there are, too, personal meditations on what resistance looks like for people who don't always have the mobility or ability to march in the streets or confront their lawmakers in person, as Ojibwe writer Mari Kurisato explains:

"My resistance comes from who I am as a Native and as an LGBTQIA woman. Instinctively, the first step is reaching out and making connections across social media and MMO [massively multiplayer online] games, the only places where my social anxiety lets me interact with people on any meaningful level."

The authors of these essays mostly have a clear activist bent, and are working, lauded, active people; they are gracious, vivid parts of society. Editor Alice Wong demonstrates her own commitments in the diversity of these writers' lived experiences: they are people of color and Native folk, they encompass the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, they come from different class backgrounds, and their disabilities range widely. They are also incredibly hopeful: Their commitment to disability justice comes despite many being multiply marginalized. Artist and poet Noemi Martinez, who is queer, chronically ill, and a first generation American, writes that "Not all communities are behind me and my varied identities, but I defend, fight, and work for the rights of the members of all my communities." It cannot be easy to fight for those who oppress parts of you, and yet this is part of Martinez's commitment.

While people with disabilities have long been subjected to serve as "inspirations" for the non-disabled, this anthology's purpose is not to succumb to this gaze, even though its authors' drive, creativity, and true commitment to justice and reform is apparent. Instead, these essays are meant to spur disabled and non-disabled people alike into action, to remind us that even if we can't see the end result, it is the fight for equality and better conditions for us all that is worth it. As activist and MFA student Aleksei Valentin writes:

"Inspiration doesn't come first. Even hope doesn't come first. Action comes first. As we act, as we speak, as we resist, we find our inspiration, our hope, that which helps us inspire others and keep moving forward, no matter the setbacks and no matter the defeats."

Ilana Masad is an Israeli American fiction writer, critic and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories . Her debut novel, All My Mother's Lovers, is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.

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Disability Ethos as Invention in the United States’ Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

2020, Humanities

This article posits that disability activists routinely present a disability “ethos of invention” as central to the reformation of an ableist society. Dominant societal approaches to disability injustice, such as rehabilitation, accessibility, and inclusion, may touch upon the concept of invention; but, with ethotic discourse, we emphasize disability as generative and adept at producing new ways of knowing and being in the world. We identify an “ethos of invention” as driving early resistance to socially constructed “normalcy”, leading the push for cross-disability alliances to incorporate intersectional experiences and propelling the discursive move from inclusion to social justice. Through our partial re-telling of disability rights history, we articulate invention as central to it and supporting its aims to affirm disability culture, reform society through disabled perspectives and values, and promote people with disabilities’ full participation in society.

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Technology is changing the ways that disabled people interact with the world; perhaps more important, it’s also shifting how the world interacts with disabled people.

As the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act approaches on July 26, many leaders, designers and scholars in the disability community say that they aren’t excited by stair-climbing wheelchairs, mechanical exoskeletons or brain-controlled prosthetics. They are drawn to innovations that embed accessibility into everyday technologies and the spaces that we all share. Also, they want people to stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist.

Mark Riccobono, who lost his sight to glaucoma as a child and is president of the National Federation of the Blind , says that blind people generally love their white canes, a simple and effective piece of technology. “A couple times a year someone comes to us and says, ‘We have this great new idea for how to replace the cane!’ ” he said. “We try to be objective, but no. You’re trying to solve a problem that’s not a problem.”

Disability technology can be so quotidian that nondisabled users don’t even notice. GPS and spell-check, so ubiquitous for so many people, are technologies that assist me with dyslexia. Smartphones, where I find my GPS, may be the most powerful accessibility devices in history, especially now that voice control offers an alternative to touch screens for Blind and low-vision users, or people without the manual dexterity to operate them. (No interface is perfect, however. Some people might actually want buttons over sleek screens. And affordability remains a problem.)

As hubs for accessibility programming, though, smartphones drive down costs. For example, Fred Downs, who lost his left arm when he stepped on a land mine during the Vietnam War and is now an advocacy director for Paralyzed Veterans of America, says that in 1980, screenreaders cost up to $50,000 a unit and could read one page at a time out loud. Now every computer, phone and tablet can read nearly any screen. Smartphones provide navigation, manage hearing aids, run speech apps and can even drive a wheelchair.

Innovations build off these capabilities, so now, for example, companies are working on mapping interior spaces to help people navigate them the same way detailed exterior maps currently do. Those who are disabled have long struggled to win the right to work from home ; these days, technologies like cloud computing and video conferencing are used everywhere and widely accepted at least for office jobs, especially as the coronavirus pandemic alters so many workplaces. Disabled employees who do not wish or are not able to go to an office can now more easily interact with their colleagues.

Disability-related technologies are not just growing through incremental adjustments to existing products; transformative ones are on the horizon. Rory Cooper is director of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories , sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He was paralyzed because of a spinal-cord injury in 1980 and has used a wheelchair since then. Now he is improving mobility devices, including wheelchairs and scooters, by adapting components designed for vehicles and drones. Mr. Cooper says he can take new batteries, motors and algorithms from other industries and build “a much lighter chair with the same capabilities.”

He has developed a waterproof chair that runs on compressed air, originally for a wheelchair-accessible water park. Water parks are fun, but more important, the innovation will make it easier for wheelchair users to go out in the rain. Meanwhile, makers of self-driving cars are now consulting not just Blind users, who have long been involved, but people with myriad other disabilities, including those in wheelchairs, who would need to be able to roll into the vehicle.

At the New York Public Library’s Dimensions lab, Chancey Fleet, who is Blind, is working with a team to make spatial learning easier for blind people and to provide access to information — part of the library’s core mission — to those who can best get it through touch. Visitors to the lab in the Heiskell branch of the library in Manhattan are invited to make 3-D printed objects and tactile graphics, or graphics embedded with Braille and other textural elements to make their meaning legible by touch. Ms. Fleet is hoping to end what she calls “image poverty.”

She says as a Blind child, “I thought I was someone who didn’t have any aptitude at all in STEM, even though I did well academically.” But she later realized her problem was not with science and technology per se. ”Looking back, it seems as though I was a spatial learner,” she said. “If the images are there, it turns out that the aptitudes are there.”

Experts in disability and technology, like Ashley Shew, associate professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science, Technology and Society, says that the best of these projects emerge out of the DIY-culture so prominent within disabled communities. Too often, the biggest and most promising innovations may come with hidden barriers, like cost, maintenance and the need to customize them.

“We’ve been misled,” said Ms. Shew, who identifies as multiply disabled and uses hearing aids and prosthetics. “The public perception is very celebratory about new developments,” but this “completely looks over issues of maintenance and wear. People think you’re given this item once and then it’s fixed for all eternity.”

Not only are devices like prosthetics and hearing aids often not covered by insurance, but expert care is hard to find. Ms. Shew, for example, travels four hours for leg prosthetic care. Meanwhile, too much technology is designed around a perception of what’s normal. For example, arm prosthetics are often designed with five fingers, a hand, but Ms. Shew says, “A lot of arm amputees don’t necessarily want” that but instead would like a bike-riding arm or a chopping arm.

Maintenance isn’t the only ongoing issue for users of disability-specific technology; intellectual property law can restrict the ability of users to customize their devices to suit their changing needs. Ian Smith, a software engineer who is Deaf, has dwarfism and uses a power wheelchair, points out that too often disabled people are not permitted to tinker with devices because of trademark issues, negating what many call the right to repair . “You’re at the mercy of the manufacturer for upgrades and repairs,” he said.

Sara Hendren, who teaches design at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts and is the parent of a child with Down syndrome, illustrates the benefits of empowering disabled designers in her forthcoming book, “ What Can a Body Do ?” In it she introduces us to Chris, who was born with one arm. After being stymied initially in trying to change his infant’s diaper, he ultimately joined felt holsters to soft cords that he could attach to his shoulder. The baby’s feet rest in the felt, secure.

“The result is nothing that would dazzle at some tech expo,” but it reveals, Ms. Hendren said in an interview, how the right technology can make the “world bend a little bit” toward the user rather than just bending the user toward a normative world. Ms. Hendren said that adaptive technology, the phrase she prefers to the more commonly used “assistive technology,” is not about helping, but about shifting both the body and the world into closer harmony. It’s not using tech to make things seem “normal.”

Bob Williams, policy director at Communication First , an advocacy group for people like him with speech-related communication disabilities, has cerebral palsy and uses a stand-alone device to produce audible speech. It was designed around 1990, and Mr. Williams is worried about obsolescence. Today, many nonspeaking individuals can use apps with speech tools built into tablets, smartphones and computers. “It’s a bridge” between disabled and nondisabled people, Mr. Williams says, because everyone can “relate to the technology.”

In my family, we’ve certainly found that to be the case, but not everyone does. My son, a white Midwesterner who is autistic and has Down syndrome, uses a speech app called Proloquo2go. There’s a default setting that mimics how he talks, but not everyone finds a voice that is fitting.

Meryl Alper, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University, argues in her book “ Giving Voice ,” that this app creates inequality. Not only do many families have trouble with programming apps like this, but Proloquo2go doesn’t “have a single speech option in U.S. English in a voice that uses speech samples from an adult woman of color. The only one that is racialized is Saul, a ‘hip-hop’ voice.”

Over email, David Niemeijer, the chief executive of AssistiveWare, the company that makes Proloquo2Go, blames prohibitive costs in making new voices. He hopes upcoming collaborations among producers of text-to-speech technologies will lower those costs.

The lack of nonwhite voices in this app is one of many such examples, says Damien Williams , a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech. Mr. Williams says that disability technology often reflects biases about race, gender and ideals of what is or should be “normal.” There are soap dispensers that don’t recognize black and brown skin, for example, and automated captioning can’t always handle accented English. Mr. Williams says programmers have to contend with assumptions about differences in race and class and need to include “underlying systems that are not based in outdated ideas about disability.”

For Ms. Shew, the Virginia Tech professor, the best way to ensure that this transformation continues will require centering the power — and the money — on disabled people as the initiators of innovation. “The future of assistive tech should be ‘cripped,’” a once-pejorative term that many members of the disability community have reclaimed, she said. “It should be bent, claimed, reclaimed, reforged, hacked, owned/controlled, made, swapped and shared by disabled people.”

David M. Perry is a journalist and the senior academic adviser in the History Department at the University of Minnesota.

Driverless Cars and the Future of Transportation

Autonomous taxis have arrived in car-obsessed Los Angeles, the nation’s second most populous city. But some Angelenos aren’t ready to go driverless .

Cruise, the embattled self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors,  said that it would eliminate roughly a quarter of its work force , as the company looked to rein in costs after an incident led California regulators to shut down its robot taxi operations.

Tesla, the world’s dominant maker of electric vehicles, recalled more than two million vehicles  to address concerns from U.S. officials about Autopilot , the company’s self-driving software.

An Appetite for Destruction: A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s Autopilot software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about Elon Musk, the company’s erratic chief executive ?

Along for the Ride: Here’s what New York Times reporters experienced during test rides in driverless cars operated by Tesla , Waymo  and Cruise .

The Future of Transportation?: Driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco . “The Daily” looked at the unique challenges of coexisting with cars that drive themselves .

Stressing Cities: In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous taxis, the vehicles are starting to take a toll on city services , even slowing down emergency response times.

A Fast Rise and Fall: Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, wanted to grow fast. Now, the company faces safety concerns  as it contends with angry regulators, anxious employees and skepticism about the viability of the business .

European Journal of Disability Research

Home Numéros 16-2 Dossier thématique The invention of disability

The invention of disability

Anthropologist Roy Wagner defined invention as a way to defy the assumption that ordinary life is in most part determined. In this text we explore the notion of disability as an ordinary or conventional one, to contrast it with the notion of vital normativity proposed by Georges Canguilhem in the section II of the Normal and the pathological , which would be close to the notion of invention that Wagner develops. In this second approach the concept of vital normativity expresses the adaptative efforts of the individual, be it with or without disability. While in the former, collectivizing view of disability standardization contributes to the othering of disability, Roy Wagner’s approach of invention if applied to disability, would stress individual creativity. We defend that this differentiating view of disability, just as Canguilhem’s concept of vital normativity, opens new venues for disability emancipation beyond the realm of representation.

L’anthropologue Roy Wagner a défini l’invention comme une manière de contester l’hypothèse selon laquelle la vie ordinaire est en grande partie déterminée. Dans ce texte, nous explorons la notion de handicap comme notion ordinaire et comme notion conventionnelle, en mettant en évidence le contraste avec la notion de normativité vitale proposée par Georges Canguilhem dans la section II du Normal et du pathologique , qui se rapprocherait de la notion d’invention que Wagner développe. Dans cette seconde approche, le concept de normativité vitale décrit les efforts d’adaptation de l’individu, qu’il soit avec ou sans handicap. Alors que dans la première vision du handicap, collective, la normalisation contribue à l’altérisation du handicap (la normalisation contribue à constituer le handicap comme altérité), l’approche de l’invention de Roy Wagner, si elle était appliquée au handicap, mettrait l’accent sur la créativité individuelle. Nous défendons l’idée que cette vision différenciée du handicap, tout comme le concept de normativité vitale de Canguilhem, ouvre de nouvelles voies pour l’émancipation du handicap/des personnes handicapées au-delà du champ des représentations.

Index terms

Mots-clés : , keywords: .

1 The anthropologist Roy Wagner states in The invention of culture (2016) that all human cultures are characterised by establishing their own division between nature and culture. What the American anthropologist was referring to is the persistent tendency of groups of humans to divide reality into two orders: that which is fixed and in some way pre-established as “natural,” and that which is subject to modification or cultivation by humans as “cultural” or, if you like, artificial. Whilst traditional peoples and peasants consider that languages, traditions, family relationships and spiritual matters belong to the fixed order, in western democracies we have dedicated many years of our lives to the cultivation of the spirit in educational institutions, inventing new forms of living together and openly throwing ourselves into the learning of new languages.

2 As far as the human body is concerned, this is classified differently depending on the culture. Many Amerindian people see the body as apparel, subject to transformations and metamorphosis, whilst in the West we tend to perceive it as part of our identity, or as one of many resources belonging to nature, open to being exploited for personal ends or to the preservation expressed in youth or functionality. Our western societies have elaborated a complex medical proceduralism dedicated to the cause of preserving health and longevity. As Michel Foucault says in Section V of Volume One of The history of sexuality , entitled “Right of death and power over life,” biopower – as opposed to that sovereign power symbolised by the sword which consisted of killing or allowing to live – is outlined as a set of tools and knowhow aimed at the best management of life, of “reinforcement and control, of vigilance, of an increase and organisation of the forces to which they are subjected: a power aimed at producing strengths, at making them grow and at organising them rather than hampering or destroying” (Foucault, 2019: 183).

3 Our productivist concept of the body has given rise to a complex scientific-technical system aimed at the preservation of health and at longevity, along with the elaboration of standards of normality and the identification of statistical deviations in the physical-psychological constitution. Foucault, and his thesis director Georges Canguilhem, showed how the classification of living things into a continuum that ranges from the normal to the pathological is a historically contingent creation from the 18th century. This notion converts the bodily differences previously expressed as botanical classifications, in order to arrange them in a gradation in which they lose their specific difference and become anomalies, by excess or default, of a healthy state, which, owing to its statistical frequency, is labelled as normal. This dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological – as Canguilhem called the arrangement of the diversity of living things into a continuum – became what Michel Foucault defined as a regime of truth, “I understand truth to be the set of procedures that allow us to assert, at every moment and for each one, statements that will be considered truthful” (Foucault, 1999: 15).

4 In this text, we will start using the concept of culture as an “analytical tool for the study of disability” (Waldschmidt, 2018: 68) in order to characterize disability as a biopolitical device, and to explore the concept of vital normativity as a way to further including the experiences of people with disabilities in disability theory, going beyond the medical model/social model divide.

5 In the first section we explore the concept of culture as it has been used in disability studies within the framework of anthropological theory and point out its similarities with Michel Foucault’s concept o f dispositif. In the second section we point out some of the pitfalls of the social model of disability and strong constructivist approaches, namely the evacuation of phenomenological experience (Shakespeare, 2006; Ortega, 2014). I suggest incorporating Canguilhem’s concept of vital normativity as devised in The normal and the pathological. In doing so, we suggest that a realist constructivist approach as defined by Francisco Vázquez García can be helpful in reconnecting disability studies to the lived experiences of disabled people. In the third section, entitled “the disabled subject in disability studies : Foucault and Canguilhem,” we suggest that the concept of vital normativity could work as a bridge between the medical and the social model of disability. In it we discuss the conceptions of biopolitics at work in current disability studies, such as Robert McRuer and David Mitchell-Sharon Snyder’s work. In the concluding remarks we put forward the idea that both the medical model and the social model have objectified disability – the first one making it an object of science, and the second exploring its implications in the realm of representation (popular culture) – and we call for an approach within disability studies that incorporates Roy Wagner’s basic tenet, namely that of invention; one that extends “innovation” to “the whole range of thought and action,” (Wagner, 2016: 34) instead of focusing on one that fixes the concept to the realm of representation.

Disability as an invented concept

6 In the classical, now somewhat outdated anthropological conception of the term, culture provides a set of shared conventions that allow people to communicate and make sense of their lived experience, as well as to control the various contingencies that occur in our everyday lives. As Tylor’s classical definition beautifully puts it, culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Wagner, 2016: 23).

7 Although disputed firstly by postmodern anthropology, and more recently by the defendants of symmetric anthropology such as Roy Wagner and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, this concept of culture as a set of conventions insidiously informs the work of the advocates of what we know as “the cultural model of disability,” that disability is a set of exclusion practices that misrepresent the life experience of people with disability and preclude social participation. An example of this is German disability scholar Anne Waldschmidt who endorses a concept of culture that denotes the totality of “things” created and employed by a particular people or a society, be they material or immaterial: objects and instruments, institutions and organisations, ideas and knowledge, symbols and values, meanings and interpretations, narratives and histories, traditions, rituals and customs, social behaviour, attitudes and identities. If cultural studies uses such a general understanding of culture, it will not only focus on symbols and meanings, but investigate the relations between symbolic (knowledge) systems, categorization and institutionalisation processes, material artefacts, practices and “ways of doing things,” and their consequences for individual members, their social positions, relations and personal identities” (Waldschmidt, 2017: 71). This is close to what Foucault defined in an interview given in 1977 as a dispositif in The confessions of the flesh:

a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, 1977: 194-5)

8 The underlying concepts of culture that many disability studies scholars have resound with this reconstructivist concept when they use disability as a term to make sense of human diversity. As G. Thomas Couser (2005) puts it, “disability is difference with a difference.” On the one hand, inner diversity of the collective that does not solidify easily into one monolithic expression; on the other hand disability is such that it often trumps other minority identities such as race or sexual orientation, therefore defining the master status of the person (Couser, 2005: 97). Drawing from Foucault’s analysis, some of the defenders of the cultural approach to disability, most notably Shelley Tremain (2017), define disability as an apparatus that, much like the Foucauldian device, “as a form of unequal power produce an array of disciplinary norms about proper social behaviour and interaction, modes of communication, rationality, emotional self-control, psychological resilience” (Tremain, 2017: 7).

9 The dispositif rightly describes how disability puts together diverse elements to arrange lines of visibility and lines of utterance, as Deleuze put it (Deleuze, 1992: 167), in order to make them appear as objects. Constructivism, thus, has done a good job in making the conventional nature – i.e. normative nature – of disability explicit, and is often described as an intricate web of social arrangements, economic interests and educational practices by which people give meaning to the world around them. While the cartography of the discourses, institutional practices and exclusion practices that keep disabled people disenfranchised in our liberal democracies has been pretty well described, the historical beginnings of the category of disability itself have not received due attention from disability scholars. We still have to look to science historians to get some idea of how the concept of disability was invented. To talk about disability in a Foucauldian sense implies asking oneself how it has become an object of study for scientific thought. As Foucault would put it: “by a set of discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of truth and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought.” (Foucault, 1999: 371).

10 The work of French epistemologist Georges Canguilhem lays the foundation for a genealogy of a category such as disability from the scientific point of view Foucault described in his quote above. In doing so, we follow Spanish scholar Francisco Vázquez García and propose that both Foucault and Canguilhem espouse a “normative realism” (Vázquez García, 2018: 102). For this purpose we will outline a genealogy of the category of disability from Canguilhem’s masterpiece, The normal and the pathological, along with the collected essays contained in Knowledge of life, to move further towards Foucault’s Society must be defended in order to draw its implications for the concept of biopolitics, which I will attempt to do here:

11 Prior to the category of disability in the late 19th century or the early 20th century, abnormal embodiments were believed to belong to the realms of monstrosity. From its primary meaning of admonition in the Middle Ages, the notion of the monster served in the baroque era to show the transition between species “ natura non facit saltus ” as Leibniz would put it, to show that nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, and thus to show the unity in the great chain of being.

12 In the 18th century, teratology would present itself as a science that ascertains the relationship of the individual with its type. It was not until the end of the 18th century that the attempt to bring abnormal specimens closer to their type would be considered a national endeavour. From tsar Peter the great of Russia to the Wunderkammer – the cabinets of curiosities – the exhibition of abnormalities was rendered as part of the fight against superstition. By the end of the 18th century, a series of strategies would be developed whose aim was to bring under control everything that affected humans as a species: birth, reproduction and death; control of the population, or, as Foucault would call it from 1976 – biopolitics.

13 Human life had become a major concern of the modern State. Biopolitics uses standards provided by science to introduce caesura into the human population, that divides it into that which should live and reproduce and that whose multiplication should be avoided; on the outer most boundary between that which should live and that which it is better to allow to die, as occurs with scientific racism.

14 However, it was Canguilhem’s work that described how biologists, physiologists and doctors drew up life regulations, primarily supported by survival, subjecting them to experimental quantifications. The norm, according to the definition given by Canguilhem in The normal and the pathological , is “that which leans neither to the left nor the right; hence it remains right in the middle” (Canguilhem, 1976: 71). The process of converting normality and pathology into gradations of the same continuum spanned the whole of the 19th century and was named the dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological.

15 In fact, in the fifth chapter of his masterpiece The normal and the pathological , Canguilhem warned of the dangers of superimposing external parameters onto life rules. It can be used both for protecting individual and collective health and life, as well as for the rationalisation of exclusion and killing through the identification of an internal enemy – the weak and the incapable.

16 Over the last few years a number of academic studies have been carried out in relation to Canguilhem’s work. Pierre Macherey and Guillaume Leblanc have stressed the importance of the norm in Canguilhem’s work and its importance in the work of Michel Foucault. While Macherey and Leblanc’s theses will prove useful later on in the text, I now want to draw attention to the work of Spanish scholars Francisco Vazquez García and Gonzalo Velasco Arias, whose works Vitalismo y ciencias humanas and Genealogías de lo biopolítico: normalidad y patología en el momento foucaultiano prove the seminal importance of Canguilhem’s work on normativity in Foucauldian biopolitics.

Vital norms and disability: medical intervention and the imposed norms

17 The debate about disabilities has been a confrontation between two opposing views: the medical model that, stemming from the 19th century has espoused the view of disability as a personal tragedy that should be cured or corrected through medical procedures, subjecting it to medical expertise; and the social model that equates the life experience of people with disability to the oppression faced by people of colour or different sexual orientation. As has been pointed out, the social model of disability erases the experience of physical limitation by turning a label into a badge (Shakespeare, 2006: 74). As Tom Shakespeare astutely points out in Disability rights and wrongs, making disability an identity as in the social model leaves disability in the same pre-discursive position as the medical model does. Both models share a concept of the body as indifferent to values, separated from culture, and fail to address how inequality and embodiment are articulated in the field of experience.

18 As Francisco Vázquez García has pointed out (2018), the work of Georges Canguilhem provides us with conceptual tools to think of disability beyond the strictures placed on it by both the biomedical and the social models. His major work The normal and the pathological, published in French in 1966, comprises two essays: the first one, from 1943, “Essay on some problems concerning the normal and the pathological,” covers the aforementioned dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological through the work of Auguste Comte and the work of the father of experimental medicine, Claude Bernard. Canguilhem describes how, through their professional practice, physicians like Francois Broussais and surgeons like René Leriche created a new area of knowledge – physiology – that postulates that the normal and the pathological are different gradations of the same quality, namely health or vitality.

19 The first part of the first section of The normal and the pathological is thus devoted to discussing the dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological. “What distinguishes nineteenth-century medicine (particularly before the era of Pasteur) in relation to the medicine of earlier centuries is its resolutely monist character.” (Canguilhem, 1989: 103). Canguilhem insists that there is not a unique normativity in nature that would cast specimens as deviants, but a constant production of anomalies that only in their interaction with the environment would they come across as pathological or adaptive. Therefore, Canguilhem rejects any kind of “metaphysical realism” that would attempt to render the outside world as it is (Vázquez García, 2018). Instead, in the second part of the first section “Do sciences of the normal and the pathological exist?” he supports a Kantian inquiry to draw out the relationship between the living being and its concepts, according to Leblanc (2002), underlining the “conditions of possibility of biological individuality” (LeBlanc, 2002: 46).

20 Aside from the intellectual influence of Francis Courtès, maître-assistant at the Montpellier faculty of letters and social sciences, whose speciality was Kant, it is hard to overestimate the influence of Foucault’s History of madness, and The birth of the clinic in the theoretical framework of the second part of The normal and the pathological : the new reflections on the normal and the pathological, which would continue the investigation that had begun twenty years earlier. From 1963-1966, Canguilhem would support a constructivist view of reality, meaning that scientific knowledge will always derive its objectivity from the construction, mediated by the faculty of judgment, of the objects of cognition, which by no means implies the direct mirroring of what exists independently of human perception. As he writes in Du concept scientifique à la réflexion philosophique , philosophy is concerned more with normativity than with the proper relationship between being and its concept. Canguilhem’s stance would oppose both the “worshipper of facts” that would derive social norms from biology, and the extreme constructivists who deny the biological facticity of bodily processes.

21 As Vázquez-García points out, Canguilhem favours a realism that is both constructivist and aims to integrate abstraction with reality as it stands in the judgement of the physician, thus making it a far from objective scientific concept. In his new reflections on the normal and the pathological, Canguilhem attempts to devise a new articulation between the vital and the normal. Canguilhem’s normative realism is not covered by either the metaphysical realism of the physicians of Bernard’s experimental medicine, or the constructionist relativism of disability studies that denies the extrapolation of scientific truth outside its community of practice. Instead, Canguilhem’s normative realism purports that reality is a regulatory threshold in the sense that it “limits the free constructions of thought” (Vazquez, 2017: 102).

22 In this new articulation he would reject subordinating biological normality to social normality, due to the rejection of the mechanism. The attempt to redirect biological normality to the service of productive needs will always result in militarism and automation, the militarisation and commodification of people. But more importantly, Canguilhem would stress the vitalist tenet that life itself is normative, since normativity is “the sum of functions that resist death,” all that helps the organism to keep its potency and maintains the homeostasis, but also what allows differentiation (i.e.: biological individuality), since living beings renew themselves through the options they take. Therefore, as Canguilhem wrote in the second chapter of part two “Do sciences of the normal and the pathological exist?” in the first section of The normal and the pathological entitled “A critical examination of certain concepts. The normal, anomaly and disease: the normal and the experimental”: “that the fact that a living man reacts to a lesion, infection, functional anarchy by means of a disease, expresses the fundamental fact that life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and thereby even an unconscious position of value; in short, life is in fact a normative activity.” (Canguilhem, 1989: 126).

23 Since vital normativity allows us to redraw the distinction between the normal and the pathological in a way that the healthy or normal man is able to institute new norms in his dealings with the environment – a way that is not available to the sick or the disabled that is often restricted to one norm only. Canguilhem is not only opposed to metaphysical realism, but also decries a purely constructivist take on embodiment and illness like the one that some disability scholars seem to defend. Disability would be a state of reduced normativity. Medical intervention should aim to enhance or foster the ability of the disabled to create new norms, instead of subjecting them to standardized criteria.

24 The concept of vital normativity is therefore a bridge between the competing views of the medical model and the social model, since it allows the bringing together of medical efforts to improve the living situation of disabled people without reducing them to objects to be normalized with medical standards. Canguilhem would agree with American bioethicist Erik Parens that a “binocular perspective” on disability is called for; an in-depth comprehension of disability that instead of pitting people who are for disability – namely people with disabilities – against people who are against it, would enlarge the meaning of impairment in the individual’s experience and social life. It would reclaim the experience of functional limitation from the medical standpoint that would reduce it – as disability rights activists have pointed out – to personal tragedy. In fact, it comes down to enabling good choices – those that allow people with disabilities to flourish:

if we show each other respect at the beginning of the day by treating each other as objects – in the sense that we help each other think about the forces that are determining our preferences – at the end of the day we show each other truly informed choices. (Parens, 2017: 147)

25 Canguilhem himself expressed it in a very similar way in the World Congress Biologie et devenir de l’homme, held in the Sorbonne in September 1974. His talk “Qualité de vie, dignité de la mort” stressed that the disabled are often prevented from adjusting to the environment by their own means, therefore interfering with their autonomy. Medical practice may come in handy in order to improve this adjustment but must avoid inducing “stigma and frustration”; the disabled person is “disenfranchised” by an environment that does not acknowledge his right to difference. Canguilhem’s take is very close to that of Erik Parens in that it acknowledges a “medical moment” in order to guide or support the disabled person’s own normativity.

The disabled subject in disability studies: Foucault and Canguilhem

26 Not only did Canguilhem anticipate by several decades the posture of the Hastings centre of Bioethics, but, as recent academic study on Canguilhem has shown (Macherey, 2011; Leblanc, 2002; Velasco, 2013), it has also proved the seminal influence of Canguilhem in the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. More specifically, Velasco (2013) insists on the structural importance of the division between the normal and the pathological not only in Foucault’s theory but in “ the governing, administering, and taking charge of humans as living beings as biological or bare life ” (Bazicaluppo, 2006: 16).

27 Within disability studies , biopolitics has been interpreted as a disciplinary regime whose objective was to enforce abnormal bodies to fit into abstract conventions of society, or to justify practices of institutional normalization, within which disabled people have been seen as objects. Such is the case of Shelley Tremain (2005) and Robert McRuer (2010) who derive their interpretations from the more genealogical Foucault and tend to understand disabled people as sheer victims of institutional procedures.

28 However, an in-depth reading of Foucault suggests that the extreme reconstructivist take on disability “that considers disability a socially constructed identity category, like race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Sandahl, 2003: 52) does not conform to Foucaldian tenets.

29 According to the entry “Michel Foucault” in the Dictionnaire des philosophes written by Foucault himself, his general project is to reconstruct the correlative objectification and subjectification in the jeux of verité . How disability became an object of knowledge is a process that can be traced back through epistemology and the history of science. How disability became a specific mode of subjectification in our culture implies tackling how embodiments that defy the norm are subjected to technologies of the self, or, as some more recent scholars have proposed (Contino, 2013; Cayuela, 2017; Moro, 2002) how acknowledging disability is a dispositif .

30 However, as many of the titles produced within disability studies show, the main task in the discipline has been in dealing with representation in the media and popular culture. This is also the case, for instance, of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, who in their book Narrative prosthesis insist on the place that disability takes in fiction: either as the evil disabled or as a preternatural creature endowed with some natural wisdom. And they conclude that:

Because representations of disability tend to reflect the medicalized view that restricts disability to a static impairment entombed within an individual, the social navigation of debilitating attitudes fails to attain the status of a worthy element of plot or literary contemplation. (Snyder & Mitchell, 2000: 19)

31 The focus of disability studies within the realms of the symbolic has been prevalent in disability studies. With a plethora of articles dealing with subjects such as disability in popular culture, mass media and literature, and being the title one of the main journals in the field – Journal of cultural and literary disability studies , one of the focuses of the discipline has been how to make the experience of disability intelligible to society at large. This effort has revolved, then, around the analysis of how this experience has been conventionally rendered in popular culture and the mass media. As Roy Wagner would write, disability studies has been the scholarly endeavour that aims to trace conventional associations of disability, meaning “that relate to one another within the field of discourse (language and mathematics are the obvious examples) and form cultural ‘sets,’ like sentences, equations, tool kits, suits of clothes, or city streets” (Wagner, 2016: 38). How disability abstracts itself from the experience of visually impaired people and poliomyelitis survivors has been the task of physicians throughout most of the 20th century. Social workers and third sector experts eventually joined this discourse, adding a dimension of social justice to it. As we have seen, the dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological gives sense to abnormal embodiments, placing them in a continuum between the normal and the pathological: medical discourse thus “objectifies its disparate context by bestowing order and rational integration upon it” (ibid.: 39), as do social workers when they target a collective as deserving public aid. Both physicians and social workers collectivize individual differences as cases of a larger group, which, in turn is singled out as deserving some kind of special treatment. Whether it is a “special needs” child, or an adult going through accommodations at work, both the personal identity of the individual going through the process, as well as the larger setting that accommodates the experience, significant transformations take place that are normative in nature. They are normative not only in the sense that they are the condition of possibility of meaningful human interaction, but also in the sense that they are moral, i.e. “is a kind of meaning, a meaning with direction, purpose, and motivation” (ibid.: 37), whose purpose is to force agents to regulate them, as Durkheim would put it, through something other than their ego. It is this idea of the subjection of the ego to something larger than itself that lurks in some of the later Foucauldian texts such as Le gouvernement de soi et les autres , in which being a subject means to belong to an epochal moment (Macherey, 2011: 95). This very idea of subjection takes us back to the second part of Michel Foucaultʼs “general project” as stated in the Dictionnaire des philosophes to produce “a history of the different ways of becoming a subject in our culture” (Morey, 1990: 20). As Foucault himself wrote in the Dictionnaire des philosophes , “il s’agit en somme de l’histoire de la ‘subjectivité’ si on entend par ce mot la manière dont le sujet fait l’expérience de lui-même dans un jeu de vérité où il a rapport à soi” (Foucault, 1984: 943).

32 How did disabled people come to be what we are in this society? This would be the Foucauldian take on disability. But, does this mean that disability is a purely reconstructivist endeavour? Again, this depends on what we understand by objectivity. As we have seen, Canguilhem opposed metaphysical realism that attempted to know the noumena , in favour of a Kantian construction of objectivity as described in the second part of Transcendental doctrine of method in The critique of pure reason – the ability of the subject to gather sensations from objects. The fact that disability is constructed, i.e. as a result of the action of human understanding, does not imply that it is irrelevant or that its relation with inequality or oppression is arbitrary. Rather, it means that for such a category as disability to be meaningful it has to observe some normative prescriptions as to where it is to be applied. As Roy Wagner would put it, ideas of functional limitation as being central to the idea of disability may be an illusion but a necessary illusion when it comes to an idea such as disability making sense. In the words of Wagner himself:

the idea that some of the recognized contexts in a culture are “basic” or “primary,” or represent the “innate,” or that their properties are somehow essentially objective or real, is a cultural illusion. Yet it is a necessary illusion, as much a part of living in and inventing a culture from the “inside” as the anthropologist’s assumption of hard and fast rules is a prop for his invention of the culture from the “outside.” (Wagner, 2016: 38)

33 The idea of the functional limitation is a “necessary illusion” for making disability an intelligible concept, an idea that can convey the experiences of disabled people to the non-disabled in meaningful ways. The necessary illusion allows people with disabilities to receive the accommodations they need. As Jill C. Humphrey puts it:

It’s very convenient for people with apparent disabilities or impairments to operate a social model which says. “We don’t want to discuss things in terms of ‘impairments’.” Because these people have got priority anyway, and impairment-related provision. The trouble with it [the social model] is that it’s very difficult for people with learning difficulties or other conditions which are not catered for to raise their concerns as things which need dealing with on a service level, without feeling that they’re breaking the law and talking about impairment. (Humphrey, 2001: 66)

34 As has been pointed out, the social model has disregarded the specific experience of limitation and suffering. With the exception of Wendell, phenomenological accounts of limitation have rarely been covered by disability studies, being left in the hands of professionals and the activism of family members (Ortega, 2014). In the 2000s, the so-called cultural model of disability has come to the rescue of the social model. Its object is no longer oppression as the universal experience of disability, but the set of patterns of interpretation of difference which, on the basis of more or less explicit assumptions of health, functional wholeness and normality, allow people to be classified on a continuum from ability to disability. The cultural model takes on the task of tracing the intertwining of physical-psychic constitutions and inequality throughout the wide variety of life situations, institutional practices and scientific discourses that the social model had left pending. Drawing on the theoretical arsenal of literary criticism and queer theory, and having established itself as an academic discipline, disability studies has established a radical constructivist view of disability that has ended up eliminating all traces of limitation or deficit in the experience of disability, focusing instead on its representation in the mass media, literature and popular culture.

35 So far, in this text we have made the case for disability as a biopolitical concept. In describing the biopolitical facture of disability, we have incorporated the Foucauldian assumption that the protection of life could become a scientific project of destruction of that life, as in scientific racism showing the most deleterious aspects of modernity. We have suggested that both the biomedical concept of disability and the social model share this biopolitical ambiguity. Moreover, we have proposed that the concept of vital normativity is therefore a bridge between the competing views of the medical model and the social model, since it allows the bringing together of medical efforts to improve the living situation of disabled people without reducing them to objects to be normalized with medical standards.

36 We would like to stress the fact that the so-called critical disability studies or cultural model of disability did not circumvent the dead ends of the social model as Tom Shakespeare and others have described. The exploration of the concept of culture that this model espouses, lies – as Waldschmidt points out – in an anthropological conception of culture, that, in the words of Roy Wagner, objectifies it. Paraphrasing Wagner, one could say “the objectification of disability has overburdened the concept of disability, attempting to capture all forms of exclusion,” and, as he went on to say, by regarding culture disability as a scholarly artefact, it has become: “totally predicated, it is rule, grammar and lexicon, or necessity, a complete perfusing of rigid form and paradigm throughout the range of human thought and action.” (Wagner, 2016: 29) .

37 What then would the subjectification of disability imply? How to capture the subjective experience of disability without framing it in the frame of the real identity between the normal and the pathological deplored by Canguilhem? What if we took the difference that disability implies as a qualitative difference or as a differentiating symbol that, instead of creating a caesura among men would merge the subjective experience with the object? While Foucault’s subjectivity was to a great extent the product of disciplines, hesitating between “criptovitalism and moral decisionism” (Vázquez-García, 2018: 118-9), vital normativity allows us to consider disability as an invention in the sense Roy Wagner expressed, having the effect of “merging the conventional ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ transforming each on the basis of the other” (Wagner, 2016: 54). Obviating the context of disability, therefore, permits an inquiry into the meaning of disability as an expression of vital normativity that resists normalization. While from the collectivizing, conventional standpoint, functional limitation becomes a necessary illusion, the differentiating standpoint allows us to see disability as a case of individual creativity. The standardization of the human body that gave rise to the dogma of the real identity of the normal and the pathological insisted on assimilating the difference that is disability. Inventing disability from Wagner’s point of view is enforcing, or enabling that difference.

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Bibliographical reference

Melania Moscoso Pérez , “ The invention of disability ” ,  Alter , 16-2 | 2022, 31-42.

Electronic reference

Melania Moscoso Pérez , “ The invention of disability ” ,  Alter [Online], 16-2 | 2022, Online since 29 June 2022 , connection on 07 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alterjdr/623

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Melania moscoso pérez.

Instituto de Filosofía, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas melania.moscoso[at]cchs.csic.es

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What is Affective Computing?

Houdini, the hunter of fake ghosts, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, how many earth-like planets are in the universe, featured author, latest book, innovation: changing the face of disability.

Approximately 650 million people in the world suffer from some type of disability and as the population ages this figure is expected to increase. Those afflicted with a physical, emotional or cognitive disability face a myriad of serious and debilitating challenges. Fortunately, the modern explosion in scientific and technological innovations provides an extraordinary opportunity to deliver profound improvements to their quality of life. Moreover, the same cutting-edge technology that can minimize or eliminate the adverse effects of disabling conditions can also be used to expand human abilities and transcend the ordinary limits of the human condition.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Laboratory, the Biomechatronics Group and the Affective Computing Group are focusing on developing novel technologies that can deeply impact people’s lives at the physical and emotional levels. The Biomechatronics Group seeks to understand the basic principles of biological locomotion in order to develop both rehabilitation technologies that restore functionality to the physically challenged and augmentation technologies that amplify the physical capabilities of healthy able-bodied individuals. The Affective Computing group works towards the development of technologies to expand our understanding of affect and its role in the human experience, with a focus on autism research and therapy. The interdisciplinary nature of the work of both groups integrates a broad gamut of disciplines, ranging from medicine to engineering.

The Biomechatronics Group and Affective Computing Group are part of MIT’s Human 2.0 initiative to mitigate the effects of disability and redefine the limits of human capability.

Biomechatronics: Disabled People or Disabled Technologies?

Though often taken for granted, walking remains essential in modern life, as stairs, uneven terrain, and other obstacles easily conquered by legs but not wheels remain ubiquitous. The loss or disability of a leg tremendously impacts quality of life and patients strive to regain or retain the ability to walk even in the presence of severe impairment.

In the United States there are more than 26 million people with physical disabilities including more than 1.7 million (more than 1 in 200) living with limb loss (NLLIC, 2008). In order to restore lost limb functions, prosthetic and orthotic technology is generally required. The need for rehabilitation and prosthetic technology is latent, as the total number of persons with an amputation and using a prosthesis is expected to reach 2.4 million by the year 2020 (Ziegler-Graham, 2008).

Currently commercially-available technologies for lower limb amputees are still far from providing fully functional replacements of biological legs. Even with the most advanced prosthetic systems available on the market, amputees still exhibit clinical problems associated with lack of adequate mobility. These include gait asymmetry, instability, decreased walking speeds and higher energy requirements. Together these gait pathologies result in significant pain and walking fatigue for lower limb amputees (Postema et al., 1997).

Although the pain felt at the residual limb corresponds to the behavior of the entire prosthetic system (i.e. from the liner and socket interface to the pylon and the rest of the prosthetic components), it is particularly associated with the coupling between the residual limb and the prosthetic leg. The imperfect coupling allows relative motion between the socket and the femur stump caused by the compression of soft tissue. This motion is uncomfortable for the amputee and causes a lack of confidence to apply large forces to the prosthetic leg. In addition, the relatively short moment arm between the hip joint and the socket reduces the force that the hip muscles can apply to the artificial limb (Whittle, 1991).

Recent advances in socket technology have reduced pain in patients by focusing on cushioning, a primary contributor to comfort. Such technologies cover a large spectrum, from gel liners and vacuum-assisted sockets to modern interfaces that rely on residual limb laser scanning and computer-aided manufacturing. Two particular technologies that have proved to be successful in pain reduction have been shock absorbing pylons and dynamic elastic response (DER) prosthetic feet (Perry et al., 1992). The damping and compliance features they provide have made them popular in most of the commercially available prosthetic systems. Despite their success in preference among amputees, abnormal gait patterns and associated with walking fatigue are still prevalent.

Walking fatigue is synonymous with higher metabolic expenditure and is a common affliction of lower-limb amputees. Walking fatigue in lower-limb amputees is considerably higher than in their matched able-bodied counterparts at comparable speeds. Measures of metabolic expenditure during walking are commonly obtained by analyzing oxygen level consumptions. For unilateral below-the-knee amputees, the rate of oxygen consumption is 20-30% higher (Herbert et al., 1994; Molen, 1973) than that for healthy persons with no impairments, and for above-knee amputees this rate increases by an additional 25% (James, 1973; Waters and Mulroy, 1999).

Conventional lower-limb prostheses, despite their damping and compliance features, have not provided a real metabolic advantage for amputees (Lehmann et al., 1993; Torburn et al., 1990; Colborne et al., 1992; Huang et al., 2000; Thomas et al., 2000). In addition to higher energetic requirements, lower-limb amputees show a reduction in their self-selected speed, and in consequence they present overall diminished endurance.

Prosthetic systems ideally need to fulfill a diverse set of requirements in order to restore the biological behavior of normal and healthy limbs. For the Biomechatronics Group, the biomechanics of normal walking provide a basis for the design and development of new actuated artificial limbs. This unique biomimetic approach to the design and development of these prostheses shows promise in improving amputees’ gait symmetry, walking speed and metabolic requirements while enhancing the adaptation to the particular amputee’s gait.

One of the objectives of the Biomechatronics Group is to develop sophisticated modular biomimetic leg prosthesis for lower-limb amputees that is capable of restoring the functionality of the ankle and knee joints of the intact human leg and fully emulating their natural behavior. This task poses many challenges for researchers as they investigate novel electromechanical designs and control strategies that can adequately integrate and adapt to the patients’ needs. The complete robotic lower l3 limb is comprised of two modular robotic joint prostheses: a powered ankle-foot and robotic knee prosthesis.

Robotic Ankle-Foot Prosthesis

The human ankle joint is essential to locomotion because it provides a significant amount of energy to push the body off the ground and propel it forward during walking, especially at moderate to fast speeds (Winter, 1983; Palmer, 2002; Gates, 2004). For transtibial (below-the-knee) amputees, the loss of this energy generation at the ankle produces an abnormal asymmetric gait, with higher metabolic energy requirements and slower speeds. Additionally, the mechanical behavior of commercially available ankle-foot prostheses greatly differs from that of a healthy human ankle-foot. Even though most of these prostheses offer some compliance and function as initial and terminal rockers due to their shape, they cannot provide the amount of external energy required in walking, making them inadequate in replicating the natural ankle’s flexibility and actuation (Whittle, 1991).

In order to overcome the disadvantages of current prosthetic technologies for below-knee amputees, the Biomechatronics Group has developed the world’s first robotic ankle-foot prosthesis that can successfully recreate the actions of the biological lower leg (Au and Herr, 2006; Au et al., 2007). Using advanced biologically-inspired design and intelligent computer algorithms, this novel device can propel an amputee forward while easily adapting to changes in ambulation speed and the walking environment. This artificial ankle-foot prosthesis allows amputees to enjoy a natural human gait over level ground, stairs, ramps, and even uneven terrain. Moreover, the device’s low weight and biological form-factor make it comfortable to wear and inconspicuous to even the trained eye. Most importantly, this innovative device reduces the rate of oxygen consumption in walking amputees by up to 20% relative to conventional prosthetic devices (Au et al., 2009).

The success of the active ankle prosthesis derives from the Biomechatronics Group’s commitment to biomimetic design. The mechanical design of this motorized device imitates the biological structures of the ankle joint by using elastic elements and flexible materials in similar roles to those of the tendons and ligaments of the human joint. This exploitation of elastic elements reduces the weight of the necessary motor and minimizes the overall power that this battery-operated system requires, allowing an amputee to walk all day on a single charge.

This cutting-edge bionic research device has been so successful that it was awarded Time Magazine’s Best Invention of the year in 2007 and led to the creation of iWalk LLC., a start-up company commercializing this prototype.

Robotic Knee Prosthesis

For above-knee amputees, a particular source of pathological gait while wearing conventional prostheses is the lack of accurate control of the knee joint, particularly while the leg is swinging during each step. The knee cannot be allowed to swing freely because it will extend too rapidly and stop suddenly as it reaches full extension. On the other hand, the knee joint cannot be so rigid that it does not bend in response to dynamics; such rigidity would result in a large increase in the amount of energy required by the patient to go from one step to the next. To prevent these extreme cases, several prosthetic knees that behave as dampers (e.g. energy-dissipation mechanisms) have been developed using friction, hydraulic, pneumatic, or electro-mechanical systems. Some have been designed as variable damping devices which adapt to angle, speed and direction of motion. These mechanisms have partially addressed abnormal gait patterns in amputees (Whittle, 1991), but have not yet been able to mimic fully the complex behavior of the knee joint.

Building on the work that led to the world’s first powered ankle, the Biomechatronics group has continued its line of innovation in bionic limbs by developing a state-of-the-art robotic knee joint prosthesis which overcomes the limitations of conventional prosthetic knees. This prosthesis is capable of replicating the behavior of the biological knee joint while seamlessly interfacing with the powered ankle, producing a full artificial lower-limb prosthesis (Martinez-Villalpando et al., 2008; Martinez-Villalpando and Herr, 2010).

The active knee prosthesis is a novel motorized device with a unique biomimetic electro-mechanical design. The artificial knee mimics the functionality of the musculo-skeletal structures around an intact biological knee joint, producing a system that, like the artificial ankle, is small, light-weight, and efficient. Its design incorporates a microcomputer and a sophisticated sensory suite that enables an artificial intelligence capable of inferring the intentions of the amputee. The advanced design and control of this prosthesis aims to improve amputee gait beyond what other commercially available prostheses can offer, not only while walking on even ground but also while traversing difficult terrain, including ramps and stairs. The integration of the robotic knee and ankle prosthesis into a single prosthetic system yields the world’s most advanced powered artificial lower limb for transfemoral amputees. Together, the active knee and ankle are expected to have great clinical impact while their novel architectures contribute to the development of future integral assistive technologies that adapt to the needs of the disabled.

Exoskeletons

Physical disabilities that often result in leg weakness include lower-extremity amputation, spinal-cord impairment (SCI), multiple sclerosis (MS) and stroke. For individuals who have suffered partial leg paralysis resulting from neurological pathology, the use of exoskeleton technology will offer a dramatic improvement in mobility capabilities over conventional leg orthotic technology.

The Biomechatronics group is leveraging its understanding of human locomotion and its experience in prosthetic limb design towards the development of exoskeletons (Walsh et al., 2006; 2007). These wearable assistive structures help augment human mobility, increase human endurance and assist physically-challenged persons. The group’s walking exoskeleton is an orthotic system that works in parallel to the body, transmitting forces between the ground and the user’s torso during standing and walking, effectively reducing the portion of body weight borne by the legs and making it easier for a disabled person to stand and to walk. Because the exoskeleton offers support normally provided by biological legs, physically disabled people suffering from leg weakness may walk with confidence while wearing it (Dollar and Herr, 2007, 2008).

In particular, the exoskeleton work developed at Biomechatronics Group looks into the passive dynamics of human walking in order to create lighter and more efficient devices with three specific goals in mind. Firstly, the exoskeleton currently under development aims to be the first wearable system that demonstrates a reduction in human energy usage during walking. Secondly, the exoskeleton should serve in potentially life-saving occupations, increasing the user’s endurance while reducing damaging loads on the knee and ankle. These potential users include active soldiers and firefighters, among others, who perform activities that require brisk movement over varying terrain while burdened with significant loads. Finally, this technology aims to assist impaired human mobility. This exoskeleton architecture could be modified into a walking orthosis which permits an active lifestyle by reducing load on injured joints while providing the necessary support for normal walking to patients with otherwise limited mobility.

Affective Computing: The Autism Challenge

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a collection of neuro-developmental disorders characterized by qualitative impairments in socialization, communication, and circumscribed interests, including stereotypical behavior patterns and behavioral rigidity to changes in routines (APA, 1994). Current studies of ASD suggest a rate as high as 1 in 110 in children by the age of 8 years in the United States (CDCP, 2009). ASDs typically manifest in infancy and persist throughout the lifespan. These disorders have a profound impact on families and often result in enormous emotional and financial costs. For instance, recent estimates suggest that the societal costs in the United States to care for all individuals diagnosed each year over their lifetime approaches $35 billion (Gantz, 2007). ASDs clearly represent an emerging public health problem (Newschaffer et al., 2003).

Through the Affective Computing group and the Autism and Communication Technology Initiative at the MIT Media Laboratory, a variety of innovative technologies are being developed to better understand and support individuals with ASD in natural environments. Three of these applications, briefly reviewed in the following paragraphs, include: 1. automatically detecting stereotypical motor movements using wireless accelerometers and pattern recognition algorithms; 2. developing unobtrusive, wireless measures of physiological arousal; and 3. creating a suite of wearable, wireless technologies that enable the capture, real-time analysis, and sharing of in situ social-emotional cues from faces, voices, and gestures of self and/or interaction partners.

Sensor-Enabled Detection of Stereotypical Motor Movements

Stereotypical motor movements (SMMs) are generally defined as repetitive motor sequences that appear to an observer to be invariant in form and without any obvious eliciting stimulus or adaptive function. Several SMMs have been identified, the most prevalent among them being body rocking, mouthing, and complex hand and finger movements (Lewis and Bodfish, 1998). SMMs occur frequently in people with mental and developmental disabilities, genetic syndromes (Bodfish et al., 2000), and less frequently in normally developing children and adults.

While investigations of ASD have increased in recent years in response to growing awareness of the high prevalence rates, the majority of this work focuses on social and communication deficits, rather than on restricted and repetitive behavior. This is a potential problem given the high prevalence of SMMs reported in individuals with ASD. Also, when severe, SMMs can present several difficulties for individuals with ASD and their families. First, persons with ASD often engage in SMMs. Preventing or stopping these movements can be problematic as individuals with ASD may become anxious, agitated, or aggressive if they are interrupted (Gordon, 2000). Second, if unregulated, SMMs can become the dominant behavior in an individual with ASD’s repertoire and interfere with the acquisition of new skills and the performance of established skills (Koegel and Covert, 1972). Third, engagement in these movements is socially inappropriate and stigmatizing and can complicate social integration in school and community settings (Jones et al., 1990). Finally, SMMs are thought to lead to self-injurious behavior under certain environmental conditions (Kennedy, 2002).

To better measure, understand, and remediate this complex class of behavior, we are developing an innovative system for automatically recognizing and monitoring SMM. Our system uses a miniature sensory suite that is comfortably worn on an individual’s wrists and torso and transmits motion data to a mobile phone. Pattern-recognition algorithms running on the phone receive these motion data streams wirelessly, compute a variety of characteristic features, and automatically detect SMM topography, onset, offset, frequency, duration, and intensity (Munguia-Tapia et al., 2004). Currently, this system has been able to correctly identify stereotypical body rocking, hand flapping, and head hitting approximately 90% of the time across six individuals with ASD in both laboratory and classroom settings (Albinali et al., 2009).

There are several potential benefits associated with this novel system. Easily automating SMM detection could free a human observer to concentrate on and note environmental antecedents and consequences necessary to determine what functional relations exist for this perplexing and often disruptive class of behavior. The system could also be used as an outcome measure to facilitate efficacy studies of behavioral and pharmacological interventions intended to decrease the incidence or severity of SMM. Finally, with minor modifications, the system could be programmed to serve as an intervention tool by providing real-time feedback to individuals with ASD and/or their caregivers when SMMs are detected.

Unobtrusive, Wireless Measures of Physiological Arousal

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is a control system in the body with far-reaching influences, including maintenance of heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, and perspiration that mediates regulation of emotion, shifting of attention, sleep, signaling of anticipation and salience, biasing of memory, and more.

A number of investigators over the past thirty years have recorded ANS activity in individuals with ASD to assess physiological responsivity during attention and habituation tasks, while exposed to social and sensory stimuli, and when engaged in self-injurious and repetitive behaviors. Unfortunately, however, there are several methodological issues associated with these studies that cast doubt on the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the data obtained. For instance, the majority of ANS studies to date use obtrusive equipment that requires individuals to sit still while multiple wires are adhered to their chest or fingers, limiting the number of participants who can comply with the procedures and thus contribute data to a study. ANS observations are also undertaken primarily in unfamiliar research laboratories that are potentially stress-inducing, and are often limited to short intervals of measurement that may or may not represent a person’s true ANS patterns when going about everyday activities. Data from these studies are also often averaged across persons so that no individual profiles are retained, obscuring the heterogeneity of response patterns across individuals.

To overcome some of these methodological problems, a novel technology platform is being developed for sensing sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic data comfortably off the wrist and ankle without wires or boxes (Fletcher et al., 2010; Poh et al., 2010). The system captures: 1. electrical conductivity of the skin, which provides a sensitive measure of changes in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition and attention; 2. heart rate and heart rate variability that provides information related to the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the ANS; 3. temperature; and 4. motor movement and posture changes through 3-axis accelerometry. The 3-axis accelerometer and temperature sensors provide information about a person’s activity and account for the influence of motion and environmental temperature on electrical conductivity of the skin and cardiovascular signals.

Monitoring autonomic reactivity using comfortable, wireless, wearable packages could enable new in situ experimental paradigms and address some of the shortcomings associated with traditional methods of recording the ANS in persons with ASD. For instance, these sensors could enable longitudinal studies of individuals that yield data beyond the traditional “snapshot” timeframe, providing new insights on within-person, within-group, and across-group differences over time, and capturing phenomena of interest that are hard to replicate in laboratory settings, e.g., panic attacks. Measuring and communicating ANS patterns that precede, co-occur, and follow an event could also provide rich data enabling new ways to anticipate, respond to, and ultimately prevent problem behaviors (e.g., self-injury, aggression towards others).

Interactive Social-Emotional Toolkit (iSET)

Many first-hand accounts from people with ASD highlight the challenges of interacting socially and difficulties inherent in the real-time processing of high-speed, complex, and unpredictable information like nonverbal cues (e.g., facial expressions) or making eye contact while processing language at the same time. Difficulties such as the following are also well-documented in a large body of empirical literature: 1. difficulty relating to other peoples’ nonverbal cues and mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1995); 2. atypical eye-gaze processing (Klin et al., 2002); 3. difficulty understanding and expressing one’s own feelings (Hill et al., 2004); and 4. trouble gauging the interests of others in conversation (Klin et al., 2000). These challenges affect interaction partners as well, making it hard for family members and others to understand what the person is trying to communicate.

Utilizing recent advances in pervasive and ubiquitous computing, sensors, and camera technology, it is now possible to have a range of on-body sensors that communicate to a portable device such as a mobile phone or ultra mobile PC. Building on these advances, we are developing an interactive social-emotional toolkit (iSET) (figure 4): a suite of wearable, wireless technologies that enable the capture, real-time analysis, and sharing of in situ social-emotional cues from faces, voices, and gestures of self and/or interaction partner(s). The technology components of iSET include a wearable camera that can be worn facing the wearer (Self-Cam) or facing outward (Head-Cam). The captured video is processed using real-time video-pattern analysis algorithms and is tagged at multiple granularities (facial actions, communicative facial/head gestures, and emotions) (el Kaliouby and Robinson, 2005).

The iSET project makes these wearable components available and accessible to individuals on the autism spectrum in the hope that it will allow this population to systemize, quantify, and reflect on their social interactions, which otherwise may seem confusing, overwhelming, and beyond their control. iSET is also designed to be fun, turning social interactions into a stimulating game that might motivate participants to engage in communication. The data and analyses offered by iSET also facilitate the sharing of social experiences with family members, teachers, and friends, and thus are inherently social.

Currently this system is being iteratively tested in the following scenarios at a large school for individuals with ASD:

• Face and eye contact. “Head-Cam” or “Third-Eye” is a wearable camera that points outward and is aligned with the wearer’s field of vision (Lee et al., 2008). The video stream is input to face-detection software that quantifies how much face-contact happens in a natural conversation.
• Systemizing social-emotional cues in self and others. Many individuals on the autism spectrum report difficulties expressing themselves in socially appropriate ways, and find it hard to identify their own feelings, as well as the feelings of others. “Self-Cam” is designed to help a person re-experience and reflect on how he/she appears to others (Teeters, 2007).
• Learning what matters. While many interventions address the problem of recognition of social-emotional cues, very few teach individuals on the autism spectrum how to identify the cues to which it is most important to pay attention. Without this aspect of social processing, a person might attempt to process every single instance of social cues, an undoubtedly time-consuming and cognitive overloading process that detracts from that person’s ability to respond in real time to his/her interaction partner. “Expressions Hunt” is a situated game we are developing in which individuals are given the task of eliciting and capturing various facial expressions such as smiles or frowns from others using a wearable camera. In this game, wearers have to think about eliciting, not just recognizing and capturing a state.

Redefining the Human Condition

We live in exciting times, as unprecedented progress in science and technology redefines human disability. Institutional collaboration and the integration of a broad range of disciplines are producing sophisticated solutions which allow people with once-debilitating physical and mental health conditions to lead healthy full lives. Meanwhile, novel technologies that create intimate connections between man and machine are augmenting human abilities beyond natural limits. Without a doubt, the contributions of leading scientists and engineers, including those at MIT’s Biomechatronics and Affective Computing Groups, are forcing society to reexamine disability and what it means to be human.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their utmost gratitude and appreciation to Dr. Mattew S. Goodwin (director of clinical research at the MIT Media Lab and associate director of research at the Groden Center, an institute for autism spectrum disorders in Providence, RI) and to Professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. (founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group ) for their invaluable contributions to the content of this article.

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Overcoming Challenges of a Disability

Now let’s take what you’ve learned about the invention process and apply it to stories about real people making a difference in their communities. Ryan Hudson-Peralta was born with a congenital limb deficiency, a rare disability that prevents his arms and legs from fully forming. His doctors said he would never drive a car, go to a regular school, or have a family of his own. Now grown up, Ryan has accomplished these things and more—much more.

Directions : Watch this video to learn how Ryan handles his disability. Be sure to listen to Ryan’s story and reflect on how he has inspired those around him. As you begin your final project later in the lesson, try to see the parallels between Ryan’s life and the work you are being asked to do. After watching, complete the chart below.

Ryan and his son, Noah, courtside at a Cleveland Cavaliers game. Noah helped produce the video as part of the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs.

Complete the Chart

List three ways Ryan confronts some of the challenges of his disability and three ways he has inspired others.

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The ADA Was a Monumental Achievement 30 Years Ago, but the Fight for Equal Rights Continues

A look back at the fight for disability rights comes with the reckoning of the challenges left unsolved

Nora McGreevy

Correspondent

For disability rights leader Judy Heumann , the tumult of 2020—first the COVID-19 pandemic, then a reignited movement against racial injustice—underscores just how much work remains to be done.

“Everything’s kind of being thrown into the pot right now, right?” she says.

Heumann has been at the forefront of the fight for equality for disabled Americans. She relishes the hard-won successes but has no misconceptions about how looking back at 30 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed on July 26, 1990, much progress still has to be made.

That day, the United States became the first country to pass comprehensive protections for the basic civil rights of people with disabilities, outlawing discrimination against individuals with disabilities in schools, employment, transportation and other key parts of public life. The ADA would also remake the physical environment of the country by mandating accessibility in public spaces—entry ramps, Braille on signs, automatic doors, curb cuts and lifts on city buses and other measures that make it easier for the more than 61 million Americans living with disabilities to participate fully in society.

Heumann, who contracted polio as a baby and has used a wheelchair most of her life, grew up in Brooklyn, where the local public school refused to let her attend because of her disability. Protections for the civil rights of people with disabilities in those days were limited—neither the 1964 Civil Rights Act nor the 1965 Voting Rights Act had included people with disabilities as a protected class.

Her first foray into activism came in 1970, when Heumann sued the Board of Education of the City of New York to become the city’s first teacher who uses a wheelchair. She later moved to Berkeley, California, where she worked alongside activist Ed Roberts at the Center for Independent Living, a pioneering home for people with disabilities founded on the principles of community and self-empowerment.

In 1977, she, fellow activists Kitty Cone , Brad Lomax and others led a grueling sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco to demand that the government enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act , which stated that federally funded organizations could not discriminate against people with disabilities. (The new Netflix documentary Crip Camp , produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, includes inspiring documentary footage of the protest.)

The 504 sit-in united Americans with different kinds of disabilities—people who were hearing or visually impared, or who used wheelchairs or had mental disabilities—in an unprecedented way, Heumann says. “It empowered us,” she recalls. “Simply put, we were slowly moving from being a rag-tag, unorganized group of disabled people … to a cross-disability movement. We were really recognizing that it was possible for us to envision a day when barriers of discrimination could be torn down… Without the voices of disabled individuals, we would not have gotten 504, the way it ultimately came out, nor would we have been able to get the ADA.”

When President George H.W. Bush finally signed the ADA in 1990, he was flanked by some of the key people who helped its passage, including Justin Dart Jr., the vice chair of the National Council on Disability, who had embarked on an epic nationwide tour to advocate for the legislation just years earlier.

“When it was passed and signed, there was a huge ceremony because it was seen as this amazing national moment, even though the law was imperfect,” says Katherine Ott, the curator in the division of science and medicine at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “At the moment, it was one of the happiest days in the 20th century for people with disabilities.”

In the three decades that followed, a new generation of Americans with disabilities, known as the “ADA generation,” grew up in a world where their basic rights were protected by the law. But the ADA has its limits.

Thirty years later, experts say that many of the ADA’s promises of universal accessibility have not come to pass—in part because laws like Section 504 and the ADA are predicated on someone litigating, explains Beth Ziebarth, who directs Access Smithsonian, the branch of the Smithsonian Institution that works to make its museums, zoo and research centers accessible to all.

“The mechanism for actually implementing the ADA, in many respects, is the process of somebody with a disability filing a complaint about the lack of accessibility,” Ziebarth says. “That leads to spotty compliance across the country.”

For instance, Heumann notes that air travel—an industry not covered by the ADA—has become “worse and worse” for people with disabilities over the years, particularly when it comes to getting motorized wheelchairs in and out of cargo pits. Technology companies, too, often lag behind in providing accessibility measures for users with disabilities—contributing to what’s known as the “digital divide,” she says.

“The ADA is a very important piece of legislation. But even if it were being implemented as effectively as possible, it still doesn’t address other issues that disabled people are facing,” Heumann says.

Issues of representation for all people with disabilities—and particularly people of color—are now more a part of the conversation than ever. When protests against racial injustice erupted across the country in May after the killing of George Floyd, many disability activists were quick to point out how issues of disability rights and civil rights for African Americans are interconnected, and sometimes overlooked. Studies estimate that one-third to one-half of black Americans killed by the police are experiencing episodes of mental illness or have a disability, although no national database exists to track those statistics, as reporter Abigail Abrams reported for Time last month.

In June, South Carolina-based disability rights activist Vilissa Thompson watched snapshots of the Black Disabled Lives Matter marches in Washington D.C. flood her timeline. “It was really incredible to see,” Thompson says.

At 34 years old, Thompson, who is black and uses a wheelchair, feels lucky to have grown up with the ADA. But the disability movement must also reckon with racism, inclusivity and an intersectional understanding of race and disability, she says.

“If you’re going to talk about black liberation or freedom, disability rights have to be involved in the story, and vice versa,” Thompson says.

On her website, Ramp Your Voice , Thompson has written extensively about black leaders in the Disability Rights Movement whose stories are often left out of the historical narrative, activists like Brad Lomax , who played a pivotal role in the 504 Sit-In by connecting activists with the Black Panther Party, which provided hot meals to the people stuck in the federal building.

In 2016, Thompson started the hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite to draw attention to media stories that center white disabled people, which continues to be used to this day: “We have to understand that black disabled folks have always been a part of both movements, the disability rights movement and the civil rights movement, whether they get acknowledgement or not,” she says.

Apart from the noteworthy anniversary, the ADA made news over a conflation of who and what the ADA specifically protects. A fake badge appropriating the ADA as an excuse to avoid wearing face masks—a claim that the Department of Justice disavowed —has blossomed on Facebook and Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Inappropriate use of the ADA is not uncommon,” Thompson says. “It’s upsetting that people are using the ADA in this way to avoid responsibility and what they can do during this time. It’s a grotesque misuse of the mandate.”

Individuals with disabilities who also have underlying chronic illness are likely at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19, and those living in nursing homes or institutions face higher risks of transmission, Heumann points out. Workers with disabilities have also been disproportionately affected by the financial fallout of the national shutdown, according to initial studies .

The pandemic also brought deep-rooted disparities in medical care against people with disabilities to the fore: in March, for instance, disability rights groups in Washington and Alabama filed complaints against state ventilator rationing plans, as Minyvonne Burke reported for NBC News at the time. These plans suggested that medical professionals could chose to not use ventilators on patients with disabilities in the case of a shortage.

“It was shades of the eugenics issue all over again,” Ziebarth says, referring to the long history of forced sterilization and euthanasia that Americans with disabilities endured, particularly in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. “That’s kind of a scary reality: we’re not far away from everything going back to where it was in the early 1900s.”

For Ziebarth, it reveals how fragile hard-won progress can be. “We realize that it’s really important for the younger generations to understand that your rights can be taken away from you,” Ziebarth says. “We need to be vigilant. Otherwise we can lose everything that people fought so hard for.”

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Nora McGreevy is a former daily correspondent for Smithsonian . She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in Wired , Washingtonian , the Boston Globe , South Bend Tribune , the New York Times and more.

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Spotlight on inventors and innovators with disabilities.

Did you know that Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, was almost entirely deaf in both ears (1)? How about that Albert Einstein, the creator of the Theory of Relativity, likely had Asperger’s syndrome (2)? So many world-changing innovations have come from the minds of individuals with disabilities, and we want to highlight some of these stars who have shaped the last century (3,4).

Ralph Braun (1940 – 2013)

Ralph Braun was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a boy and later lost his ability to walk (5). Braun would go on to found an entire company devoted to mobility products called BraunAbility . He invented and manufactured a motorized scooter, called the Tri-Wheeler. He also revolutionized the mobility industry by creating the first automobile wheelchair lift. This invention would allow individuals in wheelchairs to get anywhere they needed to go. They were also able to use public transportation, as BraunAbility wheelchair lifts began to appear on buses and trains. BraunAbility was the only company in the nation whose dealers would evaluate the circumstances and needs of individuals in order to find the best mobility options for them. 

Farida Bedwei (1979 – )

Farida Bedwei was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age one, and went on to become a software engineer and the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Logiciel, a Ghanaian financial software company (6). She invented a cloud software platform that is used by 130 micro-finance companies across Ghana. In 2013, South Africa’s CEO Magazine named Bedwei the most influential woman in government and business in Africa for the financial sector. 

Stacy Zoern (1980 – )

Born with spinal muscular atrophy, Stacy Zoern has never been able to walk (7). After writing a memoir, achieving a law degree from the University of Texas School of Law, speaking on disabilities at numerous conferences and events, and establishing herself in patent litigation, Zoern decided to pursue a new endeavor. In 2010, she founded Kenguru, Inc. and designed an accessible electric car. People in wheelchairs can easily wheel into these electric cars and operate them fully while in their chairs.

Christian Boer (1981 – )

Christian Boer had many difficulties with reading and class work as a child because of his dyslexia (8). During his time at HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, Holland, Boer designed his own font specifically for people with dyslexia. The font is called Dyslexie , and it includes asymmetrical letters and ones that aren’t uniform like other fonts. For example, two letters that dyslexic individuals often confuse in standard fonts are “b” and “d.” In Dyslexie, “b” is much narrower at the top than “d” is, so the two are much easier to tell apart. Also, all of the letters in Dyslexie font are thicker at the bottom, which anchors them to the page and keeps dyslexic individuals from flipping them over while reading them.

Temple Grandin (1947 – )

Temple Grandin is a prominent speaker and author with autism (9). She has always been passionate about animals and has written many books on animal treatment and safety. She is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. Beyond this, she works as a consultant on animal welfare and livestock handling equipment design. She has created many new and innovative animal care treatments. She was on the Time 100 , the list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.

Geerat Vermeij (1946 – )

Geerat Vermeij is an evolutionary biologist who has been blind since childhood (10). He is a professor of marine ecology and paleoecology at the University of California, Davis. He researches and chronicles the evolution of molluscs. Through his studies, he has prompted the field of paleobiology to acknowledge the influence creatures have on each other’s evolutionary fates. Vermeij received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 2000.

About the HIE Help Center and ABC Law Centers

The HIE Help Center is run by ABC Law Centers , a medical malpractice firm exclusively handling cases involving HIE and other birth injuries. Our lawyers have over 100 years of combined experience with this type of law, and have been advocating for children with HIE and related disabilities since the firm’s inception in 1997.

We are passionate about helping families obtain the compensation necessary to cover their extensive medical bills, loss of wages (if one or both parents have to miss work in order to care for their child), assistive technology, and other necessities.

If you suspect your child’s HIE may have been caused by medical negligence, please contact us today to learn more about pursuing a case. We provide free legal consultations, during which we will inform you of your legal options and answer any questions you have. Moreover, you would pay nothing throughout the entire legal process unless we obtain a favorable settlement.

You are also welcome to reach out to us with inquiries that are not related to malpractice. We cannot provide individualized medical advice, but we’re happy to track down informational resources for you.

• Frequently Asked Questions. (2012, March 31). Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.nps.gov/edis/faqs.htm
• Muir, H. (2003, April 30). Einstein and Newton showed signs of autism. Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-newton-showed-signs-of-autism/
• McGlensey, M. (n.d.). 10 Inventions Revolutionizing the Lives of People With Disabilities. Archived, from https://web.archive.org/web/20150212011616/https://themighty.com/2015/01/10-inventions-revolutionizing-the-lives-of-people-with-disabilities/
• Organization. (2013, October 22). 10 Majorly Successful People With Disabilities. April 3, 2024, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/famous-people-with-disabilities_n_4142930.html
• Ralph Braun, Founder of BraunAbility. (n.d.). April 3, 2024, from https://www.braunability.com/commercial/ralph-braun.html
• Said-Moorhouse, L. (2015, February 13). This computer genius defeated her disability with tech. Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/13/africa/farida-bedwei-ghanaian-software-genius/index.html
• Stacy Zoern Goad. (2018, June 25). Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://raisingwheels.com/project/stacy-zoern-goad/
• Gray, R. (2017, December 05). Future – The typeface that helps dyslexics read. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171204-the-typeface-that-helps-dyslexics-read
• About Temple Grandin. (n.d.). Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.templegrandin.com/
• Geerat Vermeij, Evolutionary Biologist. (2014, March 24). Retrieved April 4, 2024, from https://www.shapeoflife.org/scientist/geerat-vermeij-evolutionary-biologist

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How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability

Disability essay: introduction, disability in modern society, how does society treat the disabled person, disability essay: conclusion, works cited.

Disability is a mental or physical condition that restricts a person’s activities, senses or movements. Modern societies have recognized the problems faced by these individuals and passed laws that ease their interactions.

Some people, therefore, believe that life for the disabled has become quite bearable. These changes are not sufficient to eliminate the hurdles associated with their conditions.

The life of a person with a disability today is just as difficult as it was in the past because of the stigma in social relations as well as economic, mobility and motivational issues associated with such a condition.

A person with a disability would live a hard life today owing to the emotional issues associated with the condition. His or her identity would revolve around his or her disability rather than anything else that the person can do.

It does not matter whether the individuals is handsome or talented, like Tom Cruise. At the end of the day, he will always be a disabled man. This attitude obscures one’s accomplishments and may even discourage some people from accomplishing anything.

Other able-bodied individuals would always categorize such a person as a second-class citizen. It would take a lot of will power and resolve to get past these labels and merely lives one’s life. Opponents of this argument would claim that some great inventors of modern society are disabled.

A case in point was Dr. Stephen Hawkings, whose mathematical inventions led to several breakthroughs in the field of cosmology (Larsen 87). While such accomplishments exist, they do not represent the majority.

Persons like Hawkings have to work harder because they have their handicaps to cope with alongside their other scientific work. A disabled scientist is more diligent than a normal one because he has two forms of hurdles to tackle.

It is not common to find such immense willpower in the general population. Therefore, disability leads to a tough life owing to its emotional demands on its subjects.

How the Society Can Be Helpful to the Disabled People

Modern life has created several technologies designed to simplify movement. For instance, modern cities have stairs, trains, cars, doors and elevators to achieve this. However, these technologies are not easy to use for disabled people.

Many of them find that they cannot climb stairs, drive cars or even access trains without help from someone else. Therefore, while the rest of the world is enjoying the benefits of technology, a disabled person would still have to overcome these challenges in order to move from place to place.

Some opponents of this assertion would claim that the life of a disabled person today is unproblematic because a lot of devices have been developed to facilitate movement and other interactions. For instance, a person with amputated legs can buy artificial limbs or use a wheelchair.

However, some of the best assistive technologies for the disabled are quite expensive, and average citizens cannot afford them.

Many of them would have to contend with difficult -to-use devices like wheelchairs, which may not always fit into certain spaces. They would also have to exert themselves in order to use those regular devices.

Social relations are a serious challenge for disabled people today. A number of them live isolated lives or only interact with persons who have the same condition. Social stigma is still rife today even though progress has been made.

Friends would simply be unwilling to dedicate much of their free time to help this disabled person move. Additionally, finding a life partner or marrying someone would also be a laborious process because of the physical and psychological implications.

If one’s handicap is physical, and affects their kinetics, then they would not engage in sexual activity.

Alternatively, psychical deformities may be off putting as many individuals find them sexually unattractive. These social stigmas can impede a disabled person’s ability to enjoy normal relationships with others.

Economic hurdles are also another cause of unfulfilled lives amongst the disabled. Some jobs do not require an investment in one’s image, so these would be tenable for the disabled. However, a number of positions take into account one’s physical image.

These include television anchoring, sports, politics, and even sales jobs. The practical demands of these jobs, such as sales and sports, would not allow a disabled person to engage in them meaningfully.

Alternatively, the positions may also place too much emphasis on physical appearance to the point of making disabled persons unsuitable for them. While the latter might seem like discrimination, it is a given fact that the world is increasingly becoming superficial.

Companies only want to focus on what sells, so they have little time to be proactive or fair. In essence, these attitudes close the door t many opportunities for the disabled as they pigeonhole them into passive professions.

Modern societies have not eradicated the obstacles that persons with disabilities face. This is evident in their attitudinal inclinations as most of them reduce a disabled person’s identity to their inability rather than their accomplishments.

Difficulties in mobility and use of technology among the disabled also testify to their hardships. Social stigma concerning their physical attractiveness and demands in friendships also limit their social relationships.

Finally, their economic prospects are neutralized by their mobility challenges as well as their physical image. All these hurdles indicate that disability causes its victims to live painstaking lives.

Larsen, Kristine. Stephen Hawking: A biography . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 2007. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 29). How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability. https://ivypanda.com/essays/disability-in-modern-society/

"How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability." IvyPanda , 29 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/disability-in-modern-society/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability'. 29 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/disability-in-modern-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/disability-in-modern-society/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "How Does Society Treat the Disabled People | Essay on Disability." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/disability-in-modern-society/.

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News | Dec 29, 2023

VA Innovations Benefit People with Disabilities

Helping veterans and civilians with disabilities, one invention at a time

Businesses and entrepreneurs across industries are working to assist people with disabilities. But for many of these individuals, innovations that impact their lives have been slow to materialize  — and insufficient.

There are a range of disabilities impacting 27% of Americans including:   

• 13% have a cognition disability and serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions
• 12% have a mobility disability and serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs
• 7% have an independent living disability with difficulty doing errands on their own
• 6% are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing 
• 5% are blind or have serious difficulty seeing even with glasses
• 4% have a self-care disability with difficulty dressing or bathing [1]

Fortunately, private industry can look for help to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA develops inventions for veterans that can also assist other people with disabilities. TechLink helps businesses gain access to VA inventions. As the national partner for technology transfer for the VA and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), TechLink has helped broker — at no cost — almost 2,000 license agreements between businesses and federal labs for emerging technologies, many of which can improve the lives of people with disabilities. 

Check out these breakthroughs from VA labs available to license today: 

• Helping people with visual impairment:  The World Health Organization reports that at least 2.2 billion people worldwide have severe vision impairment, [2] yet innovations for them to improve orientation and object-avoidance have advanced little beyond white canes and guide dogs.  Thanks to an invention by the VA, aids for visual impairment are entering the modern era of sensors, miniaturization, computing power, and connectedness. VA researcher Brian Higgins developed a self-propelled guide system that uses a range of technologies — LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasonic sensors, GPS, WiFi, accelerometer, and tactile feedback — to capture and communicate rich details about the environment surrounding a person with visual impairment. With the GPS guidance system :
• Sensors are arranged to provide information, detecting objects from ground level up to tree branches.
• The system interfaces with GPS and can provide powered guidance to a destination.
• Technologies scan forward, upward, and downward to provide full awareness.
• Software incorporates information from previous trips to predict the location of objects.
• Information is sent from the device to a Bluetooth ear plug or wrist-worn device to provide real-time awareness.
• Helping people with prosthetics: Approximately 1.7 million people in the United States use a prosthetic limb, of which about 10% use upper-limb prosthetics. [3] Individuals using a hook-type  prosthetic device have had difficulties with common tasks like moving a computer mouse or pressing buttons. Dr. Rory Cooper and his colleagues at the VA’s Human Engineering Research Lab have invented a novel computer mouse modification to help mitigate these challenges.  The VA lab has printed a limited number of the low-cost devices, which modify an existing mouse with a 3D-printed cover, enabling a user to grasp it with a hook and operate switches by tilting the mouse shell. The prosthetic-compatible computer mouse provides improved access to computers — often necessary for work, leisure, and communication — and significantly improves a user’s quality of life. 

Which technologies does your company need to help people with disabilities? The tech transfer process facilitated by TechLink can connect your company to emerging technologies like these — today. Start by searching our tech marketplace.  

[1] “Disability Impacts All of Us,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 2023.

[2] “Blindness and Visual Impairment,” World Health Organization, Aug. 10, 2023.

[3] “ 29 Limb Loss Statistics, Facts, & Demographics,” Pro Medical East, 2023.

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