Constructions of Disability

Researching Inclusion in Community Leisure

Claire Tregaskis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134355778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This innovative book discusses the meaning of 'inclusion' through the exploration of the interactions between disabled and non-disabled people at a community leisure centre. By exploring the nature of this interface, an understanding of how people create potential for both disability and inclusion is revealed. This book takes a very different approach to that of existing texts, which have tended to concentrate mainly on disabled people's exclusion. The advantage of this new approach is that it adds an extra dimension to our understanding of how discriminatory practice is variously perpetuated and challenged.. Constructions of Disability is valuable reading for all people who are working towards increased social inclusion for disabled people, including theorists and students of disability studies and learning difficulty, leisure management and disability service providers, and their families. Using a practical case study approach, it explores the impact that social interaction between disabled and non-disabled people can have increasing or decreasing disabled people's opportunities for inclusion. Examples of both inclusive and discriminatory practice are described in detail, and the positive and negative effects of these actions on the participants are demonstrated and discussed. This insightful book offers a wide range of practical suggestions for the future development of more inclusive theory, policy and practice.

Chapter 1: Introduction

What this book is about

This book explores some of the ways in which constructions of disability can affect disabled people's chances of inclusion in ordinary mainstream social environments. Through a detailed investigation of social interactions between disabled and non-disabled people in one such setting – a leisure centre – it explores a range of factors that can affect people's ability to relate to each other, and what parts both individual and structural constructions of disability can play in the ongoing process of creating inclusion and exclusion. In so doing, the book demonstrates some of the ways in which people may use disability and impairment as reasons to either put up barriers between themselves and others, or as the basis of establishing common ground, depending on the situation and the circumstances in which they find themselves.

At the outset I should explain that, although the research discussed here took place in a recreational setting, and the data was collected using a range of ethnographic research methods, this book is not a conventional ethnographic study of a leisure centre. In other words, it will not tell you everything you ever wanted to know about how a leisure centre operates, nor does it offer a detailed analysis of the economics and politics of leisure provision in Britain today, although these issues are touched upon in some of the discussion that follows. Instead, the leisure centre here forms a situational backdrop to the relationships between disabled and non-disabled people which are the primary focus of this research. In this account, it is principally those interactions that are foregrounded and analysed, and not the setting as a whole. This is achieved largely through the relatively unusual device of using myself as simultaneously researcher and research subject, and by recording the ways in which disability was constructed through other people's responses to me and to the other disabled people I met in the course of the research. As a result, what follows is in part an exploration of who I was in that setting. By deconstructing my multiple identities at the leisure centre, I will show something of the complexity of who I was in that setting, as well as uncovering some of the ways that non-disabled people's multiple identities were equally implicated in the range of ways in which they responded to me and to the other disabled people they encountered. The study thus aims to disrupt the apparent certainties of one-dimensional cause-and-effect analyses of disabled people's exclusion by showing that, in this setting at least, the jumble of interpersonal relationships combined with the impact of the politics and economics of the leisure centre made for a far more complex and confusing scenario. The findings suggest that there are no ‘quick fixes’ in terms of challenging exclusion, but that instead a range of situationally appropriate access solutions is required before real inclusion may be said to have been achieved.

Refocusing on the interface between disabled and non-disabled people

In focusing explicitly on the dynamics of the interpersonal interface between disabled and non-disabled people as a means of exploring the possibilities for inclusion, this work differs from previous disability-related texts that have concentrated primarily on reporting disabled people's response to the experience of oppression. That wider task of demonstrating disabled people's exclusion from mainstream structures such as education, housing, the world of work, and other areas of social interaction which members of the mainstream take for granted has already been ably undertaken by others (e.g. Barnes, 1991; Barton, 1993; Clough and Barton, 1998; Mason and Rieser, 1999; Oliver, 1990, 1996; Simons, 1992; Vernon, 1999), and this study does not seek to replicate their findings as such. Instead, by exploring the disabled/non-disabled interface in more detail, the research aims to expose the subtlety of some forms of disability discrimination from a different angle, including an analysis of the part which both disabled and non-disabled people may play in variously replicating and challenging exclusionary policies, practices and behaviours (Giroux, 1992).

This focus on the interface follows a recent wider trend of researching previously taken-for-granted categories as a means of challenging oppression. Thus Stanley and Wise (1993: 31) argue that ‘any analysis of women's oppression must involve research on the part played by men in this’. In similar vein, Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993) have questioned the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm in feminist theory, and contributors to their collection have sought to problematize their own heterosexuality. Equally, Wong (1994) has exposed whiteness as an uncontested category in research, and Tarver-Behring (1994: 207) has called upon white women to acknowledge and explore the multiplicity of their own identities as a precursor to being able to better understand – and make connections with – women from minority groups, who of course have equally complex and multiple identities. This book follows this new trend of minorities investigating majorities as a way of adding to our understanding of the reasons for the ongoing prevalence of discrimination against minority groups in Western societies. Many instances of discrimination are docu-merited and presented for analysis here. However, the data also suggest that there may be some cause for cautious optimism, by questioning traditional assumptions of a binary and unchangeable opposition between all aspects of disabled and non-disabled people's experiences, and thereby allowing for the possibility of identifying limited common ground on which to base practical alliances for change.

Indeed, one of the purposes of this book is to encourage disabled and non-disabled people to explore some of the ways in which their own actions may (often unconsciously) compound the exclusion of others. In writing it, I have been forced to challenge my own prior assumption that non-disabled people have the monopoly on oppressive behaviour. Instead, as the data discussed here will show, we all have the capacity to oppress people who are situationally less powerful than us (Vernon, 1999). However, it remains the case that, although sometimes protected from particular instances of oppression by their class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation (Appleby, 1993, 1994; Corbett, 1994; Humphrey, 2000; Vernon, 1999), disabled people are in general one of the most oppressed groups in British society (Barnes, 1991). Thus there are detailed here many instances of interactions characterized by the operation of unequal power relations, in which the person with less situational power was usually also a disabled person. However, also discussed are examples of disabled and non-disabled people coming together on an equal basis to achieve a common goal, a cooperative model of working that may point the way towards a common future based on mutual respect and the equal valuing of difference.

Why I wanted to write this book

My research focus here on exploring some of the practicalities involved in working towards achieving greater social inclusion came about largely as a result of events in my own life as a disabled person. Although I attended mainstream schools throughout my education, it was by no means a happy experience, and by the time I left school I was convinced that non-disabled people were a different species of being to me, and that we had nothing in common with each other. However, once my working life began, I found that the vast majority of people with whom I was working were members of this non-disabled alien species. Since I could not avoid contact altogether, I realized that I had to find common ground with at least some of them if my time at work was not to be incredibly lonely and isolated. And then over the years, as both my self-confidence and my professional work skills increased, so too I realized that my personal relationships with non-disabled people had actually become an important, even necessary, part of my existence. They were no longer aliens – now they were my friends – and in many respects our commonality had become as important as our differences.

Undertaking the research on which this book is based gave me the opportunity to reflect back on those formative years and, in seeking to uncover something of non-disabled people's approach to disability issues, also forced me to review my communication strategies, and the ways in which my own behaviour has variously challenged or perpetuated existing prejudice against both disabled and non-disabled people. As such it was not an entirely comfortable process, but it did teach me a great deal about myself. In undertaking this journey, and in uncovering examples of prejudice against more than just disabled people, I also found myself moving from a fairly solid disability studies mindset to one which sits somewhere in the interface of explanations for a range of oppressions including disablism, sexism and racism. Therefore, although the ostensible focus of this book lies in exploring constructions of disability, both its research approach and its findings make it relevant not just to a traditional disability studies audience, but also to the wider readership of policy makers and practitioners who are similarly engaged in the process of trying to develop inclusive practice.

Aims of the book

In the context of developing social policy aimed at achieving inclusion for all minority groups, the book has four main objectives.

• First, it will show that bringing about more inclusive practice is about changing attitudes as well as adapting organizational policies and practices.
• Second, in focusing on the disabled/non-disabled interface it will show what non-disabled people in one social setting – anonymized here as ‘Greenways Leisure Centre’ to protect its real identity – thought about disability, impairment and disabled people, as well as something of what they thought about women and people from minority ethnic groups.
• Third, it will question the implicit assumption in many existing social model of disability accounts of a permanent and unchanging binary opposition between the interests and experiences of disabled and non-disabled people, and will suggest that actually we may have more in common than we think.
• Fourth, the complex and often contradictory nature of the findings reported here disrupts the apparent certainties of one-dimensional cause-and-effect analyses of inclusion and exclusion, and suggests instead that a range of situationally appropriate access solutions is required before real inclusion may be said to have been achieved.

Why focus on leisure in this research?

Choosing to base research into disabled/non-disabled interactions at a leisure centre might at first sight appear an odd decision, when social settings such as schools and workplaces are more usually in the forefront of discussions about how inclusion for disabled people can be achieved. However, there were a number of reasons for my choice of location. First, because disabled people are at least three times as likely as non-disabled people to be unemployed (Vernon, 1999) it seemed unrealistic to locate the research in a workplace setting where there might be few or no disabled members of staff, and/or where there was little or no contact with members of the public. Similarly, I expected that there would be relatively few disabled children and staff in mainstream schools. At a leisure centre, however, it was assumed that there would be enough disabled people present to make it possible to observe a sufficient amount and variety of social interactions between them and non-disabled people to enable research conclusions to be drawn from the data.

Second, the recent explosive growth of the leisure industry, especially in areas of the country where traditional heavy industry has declined, combined with demographic changes resulting in a higher proportion of older people in the population as a whole, means that the need to ensure that leisure provision takes account of the needs of older and/or disabled people is increasingly relevant to policy makers and practitioners alike (Torkildsen, 1993: 1.19). Further, new research into young disabled people's experiences of leisure provision (Murray, 2002) undertaken in parallel with the present study, shows that they see leisure as being central to their individual experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, it is in such relatively less formal leisure settings that the presence or absence of the sort of social networks and relationships that most members of the mainstream can take for granted may either create new opportunities for disabled young people's enjoyment and personal growth, or else starkly reinforce their feelings of social isolation. This finding endorses recent legislative and policy developments relating to disabled people. Both the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act and the 2001 White Paper Valuing People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century require policy makers and service providers concerned with developing and delivering services of all kinds to respond creatively to the access needs of disabled people, who form an important and sizeable customer market. Of particular relevance to this study are the provisions made in Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act, which place a legal duty on those providing goods, facilities and services to the public to avoid discriminating against disabled people. Thus, since December 1996 it has been unlawful for service providers to treat disabled people less favourably than non-disabled people on the basis of impairment. Since October 1999, service providers have had a duty to make what are termed ‘reasonable adjustments’ to their service delivery, if disabled people need this in order to be able to access the service; and, from 2004, reasonable adjustments will also have to be made to improve physical access to venues. Also pertinent here is the need referred to in the Valuing People White Paper (Department of Health, 2001: 80) for disability service providers to include access to leisure activities as an integral part of individual and community care plans, rather than viewing this as a non-essential optional extra, as is often the case at present.

Finally, at a personal level my decision to base the research in a leisure setting resulted directly from my previous professional background as a countryside recreation officer, where my job had involved bringing together recreation managers and disabled people to plan and implement the removal of physical and programme access barriers. For this research project I knew that I wanted to study relationships in an area of the leisure industry, but not within the countryside setting with which I was perhaps too familiar. I hoped that choosing a leisure centre for the research instead would enable me to bring to this new setting some of my pre-existing generic recreation management skills and knowledge, whilst also providing me with the opportunity to observe additional management techniques that were new to me. I was also interested to explore whether an indoor leisure setting would prove as relaxed and inclusive as I had found many countryside management services to be.

In presenting my research data on interactions between disabled and non-disabled people at Greenways Leisure Centre, I hope to reinforce Murray's (2002) finding that participation in leisure is of central importance to disabled people's experiences of inclusion and exclusion, because of the interplay involved between the desire for access to leisure and the need for inclusive social relationships to help put this desire into practice. This is the essential extra human dimension that we sometimes miss when we concentrate solely on reacting to legislative and policy imperatives without understanding exactly why such developments are important in the lives of real people. I hope that the research findings presented here will help to underscore why disabled people need better access to leisure, as well as suggesting some practical ways in which this can be achieved.

Constructions of disability: the link between structural and attitude barriers

Carrying out research within a leisure setting used by disabled and non-disabled people alike proved to be a useful fulcrum point for studying diversity, discrimination and cooperation in action. Through an investigation of the construction of disability within that setting, I was able to explore the hypothesis that such responses, and the attitudes that flow from them, do not exist in isolation but are in fact created, altered and maintained by a wide range of external material and cultural factors, as well as by individual psychological ones. I wanted to see if it was possible to resituate the ‘attitude problem’ from the realm of the purely personal to where I believe it truly belongs – simultaneously in the interface between individual disabled and non-disabled people, and in the positioning of those individual relationships within a wider historically specific social context of political, economic and administrative inclusionary–exclusionary influences (see also Thomas (1999)). I believe that making such a shift in emphasis would in turn make it more difficult for discrimination's apologists to continue to explain exclusionary practice on the grounds of impairment as resulting purely from an individual's failure to understand ‘the other’ because of their perceived difference from the non-disabled norm. In pursing an agenda for disabled people's inclusion, then, this book will make the case that attitude-based discrimination should be viewed as forming an equal part of a symbiotic, mutually sustaining, relationship with structural-based discrimination. Later chapters will show some of the ways in which attitudinal and structural barriers were uncovered and challenged in the research setting. In turn, these data form the basis of my main argument here, which is that attitudinal and structural barriers must be addressed simultaneously in order to make sustained and timely progress, rather than assuming that either structural change or attitudinal change alone will end discrimination against disabled people. Thus we need to get to a position where disability discrimination is viewed as being on a par with other forms of social oppression, including institutionalized racism (Home Office, 1999), and begins to be tackled in a similarly systematic way across all social structures.

Organization of the remainder of this book

It is recognized that the readership for this book is drawn from a range of professional and practitioner fields. Thus the main body of the text starts in Chapter 2 with an introduction to those ideas from the disability field, specifically the social model of disability and normalization/Social Role Valorization, that have influenced both the way in which the research was carried out, and the subsequent data analysis. Chapter 3 continues the focus on theory, by examining how and why my analysis of the construction of disability was made easier once I had recognized the importance of multiple identity as a key medium through which disabled people's exclusion at Greenways was variously perpetuated and challenged. Moving more toward the practical, also discussed here is my growing awareness of the ways in which my own presence in, and influence on, events at the leisure centre affected the research; and the way that over time I came to view the inevitability of this ‘researcher effect’ on the field of study as adding an extra dimension to my understanding of the way in which disability is variously constructed and challenged through the attribution and/or projection of particular aspects of an individual's identity in social settings.

It was this discovery of the vital importance of identity formation and attribution in improving or diminishing the potential for inclusion that led to the identity-related structuring of subsequent chapters of the book. Thus Chapters 4 to 13 chart my observation and understanding of a range of inclusive and exclusionary practices as revealed to me through the complexity of my own multiple identities as researcher, consultant, member of staff, friend, woman, white person, embodied being, disabled person, oppressor and activist. In each of these chapters I have selected and described key events which seemed to illustrate people's constructions of disability in that situation, depending on their perceptions of my identity at the time. In some chapters there is relatively little directly attributable data, while others have a lot. I have decided, however, to keep them all in, so as to reflect as fully as possible the complexity of my fieldwork identities and relationships. Sometimes indeed it proved impossible to completely separate out one identity from another, and in those situations an element of cross-referencing and replication of data has proved inevitable. In all these chapters, I show what people's existing attitudes were, and then go on to give some suggestions as to ways in which policy and practice might be developed in the future so as to reduce the occurrence of disability and increase the potential for inclusion. Finally, a brief explanation of the ordering of these data chapters is required. Given that not all readers will have personal experience of impairment, or of impairment-related disability, I decided to start with chapters which discussed those aspects of my identity which were in themselves the least overtly impairment-related. It is hoped that both disabled and non-disabled readers will discover some aspects of my experiences here, for example around being a researcher, a friend, or a woman, with which they can consciously identify. As the book progresses, I then move on to discuss issues around the impaired body, and being both a disabled person and an oppressor, which may be less familiar to some readers. I end the data analysis on what is deliberately int...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Researching the interface: Theories on the construction of disability
• Chapter 3: Greenways Leisure Centre: Issues, identities and impairment factors
• Chapter 4: Being a researcher
• Chapter 5: Being a consultant
• Chapter 6: Being a member of staff
• Chapter 7: Being a friend
• Chapter 8: Being a woman
• Chapter 9: Being white
• Chapter 10: Being a body
• Chapter 11: Being a disabled person
• Chapter 12: Being an oppressor
• Chapter 13: Being an activist
• Chapter 14: Conclusions
• References