No, you have a neurological "impairment" following the social model, or to consider it yet another
way a neurological difference which has a negative impact on your bodily condition.
It is only from particular perspectives that you are "disabled" because that implies a judgement of
what a normal range of function should be. All that impairment is, is sub optimal performance in a
given situation, the situation determining the degree to which a difference is sub optimal.
In other words I am positing an environmental or engineering model of "impairment" which gives rise
to a social model of disability and leaving the medical out of it entirely. Your ability to mediate
the degree of impairment depends of course on whether it is either possible to re-engineer the
biological environment, the physical environment and the social environment, all of which require
there to be judgement that it should be done, hence it all still fits within a social model.
A town divided by a river is "impaired", the necessity of a bridge or the abiltiy to build one is
dependent not so much upon whether it can be done, but whether it will be done.
As for what the self is? I have as many selves as there are people to give selfhood to me, my own
conception of self is dependent upon so much else that the I is sometimes elusory. (I refer you to
the concepts of false consciosness) Of course I judge from my centre how I shall call "my" "self"
that only really makes it true for me, from the viewpoint of a vast history and interconnection of
physicality and physics who can ever know for sure? We advance theries, and they survive by there
usefulness as tools. I think the social model survives as an empowering tool not a scientific
explanation, and there is a big difference because if you look at your self in that light it
increases the possibilities that can be achieved with the given set of circumstances one starts out
with and allows one to escape the victorian notions of everyone in there station, the rich man in
his castle, the poor man at the gate.
Larry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Margo Milne
> Sent: 09 August 2008 00:19
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Neurodiversity, neurological disability and the
> public sector: notes on the autism spectrum
>
> Well social model or no social model, I have a neurological
> disability, centred in my self. The main limitations on what
> I am able to do come from the fact that my immune system is
> destroying the functioning of my central nervous system.
> Sorry and all that!
>
> Margo
>
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