Disability & Communication Rights: A Radical Remapping of Media and Their Global Territories

• In Event: IAMCR: Transforming Culture, Politics & Communication: New Media, New Territories, New Discourses

Abstract

An excellent, yet still little appreciated, example of the transformations associated with communication can be found in the cultural and political shifts in disability. Long marginalized and excluded, people with disabilities have achieved significant progress in achieving justice and rights. In the process, a general rethinking is irreversibly underway in how global societies regard disability, and its dynamic intersectional relationships with gender, race, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and other categories. As we remap the terrain of disability, perforce we rethink the territories of body, mind, senses, action, subjectivity, identity, belonging, and power –– and communication, too. Nevertheless, there has been little acknowledgement –– including by communication researchers –– of the distinctive kinds of communication and media use, cultures, and innovation associated with the very diverse range of people with disabilities (especially when viewed internationally, and across cultures). Accordingly, in this presentation, I elaborate these ideas to sketch a twofold argument: firstly, disability is transformative for concepts of communication; secondly, if we rethink communication via disability in such a way, we need a new account of communication rights.

Author

• Gerard Michael Goggin, The University of Sydney