How can we learn to notice the signs of disability?
We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped "deaf
person in area" road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or
white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs
are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still
not be perceived due to a process she terms "dis-attention."
To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns
to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand
the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that
then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize
phenomena-including disability. By adding perception to the
understanding of disability's materialization, Kerschbaum significantly
expands our understanding of disability, accounting for its fluctuations
and transformations in the semiotics of everyday life.
Drawing on a set of thirty-three research interviews focused on disabled
faculty members' experiences with disability disclosure, as well as
written narratives by disabled people, this book argues for the
materiality of narrative, suggesting narratives as a means by which
people enact boundaries around phenomena and determine their properties.
Signs of Disability offers strategies and practices for challenging
problematic and pervasive forms of "dis-attention" and proposes a new
theoretical model for understanding disability in social, rhetorical,
and material settings.
