Simon wrote:
>I am personally in favour in Narratives as I think it gives a understand
>for the complex relationships and psycho-social responses towards
>impairment. I am away that many social model theories feel narratives
>undermine the social model and disturbs the impersonal ideology of social
>model purity. I do feel disability is a far more complex than many
>disability movementists would care to admit.
>
>I personally want to share my story as it is a story about breaking free
>>from oppression both from non-disabled and disabled people. I feel at the
>moment my complex lifestyle decisions are not known by others and that I
>should be a part of the knowledge which makes our society. The
>self-analysis and thought about the nature of drooling, for example,
>within a business setting, deserves exploration in a personal way.
>
I think one of the biggest problems is that we read 'narratives' in a fixed
way. The social model and the UPIAS Fundamental Principles of Disability
are themselves narratives, but they are 'collective narratives'. As such,
they reflect the histories of their authors just like any personal
narrative would. The difference, perhaps, is that collective narratives
have attempted to identify common ground between these authors in order to
develop a view of society, or more specifically, the social structure of
society. When you read the background to the development of this particular
collective narrative, it is clear, nevertheless, that at the time of
writing, this was not the only collective narrative around in the disabled
population, and it still isn't, and different collective narratives exist
in power relationships with each other. If anything, the narratives we
produce collectively are becoming ever more sophisticated and ever more
complex because we are becoming more inclusive in the way we think about
disability.
However, I remain convinced that it is important to look outside of
oneself. Whilst personal narratives and the strategies they describe can be
enormously effective at the local level, I can understand why they might be
seen as an inefficient political tool in our attempts to effect social
transformation. If we can move to an understanding of different kinds of
narrative doing their work at different levels of social structure and
process, and if we can recognise that for many disabled people, 'saying' is
the only way they have of resisting oppressive practice, then we might be
able to move beyond the kind of simplistic views of narrative that abound
in disability texts.
I'd like to link this n to Mike Oliver's recent paper, that was advertised
on this list. It's true it's a great paper. In it, he makes a very
interesting argument for materialism - for 'doing' coming before 'thinking'
by insisting that when we meet new people our first question is almost
always 'what do you do?' He says that if we introduced ourselves by saying
'what do you think?' most people would think we were very strange, and the
question 'How do you feel about ...?' doesn't come into the equation. I
think (!) this could be given a whole range of interpretations, one of
which is that such a question is so much a part of our social rituals that
we ask it effortlessly, and another of which is that it is a gendered
question because in times of social inequality it is still men (disabled or
not) who are more likely to have work and it is still men who dictate the
rituals. Men may well talk about 'doing' but is it my imagination or do
women more often talk about what they feel? It is also true that most
people exhaust the answers to the question pretty quickly and if we don't
then move on to what we think about what we do, among other things,
interaction falls flat. Added to that, is not asking the question in the
first place 'doing' interaction? All of this says something about how
narratives are built and why, perhaps, we need to be more careful in our
reading of them.
Best wishes
Mairian
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow, School of Education and Social Science, UCLAN;
Visiting Senior Research Fellow, School of Education, Kings College London.
Address for correspondence:
111 Balfour Road
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London N5 2HE
U.K.
Minicom/TTY +44 [0]20 7359 8085
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"To understand what I am doing, you need a third eye"
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