Emancipatory research and disabled people: some observations and questions

Many factors contribute to the oppression and discrimination of disabled people and to their exclusion from key decisions affecting the quality of their lives. In the last two decades in particular there has been an increasing interest in many societies over the role of research in relation to the empowerment and thus inclusion of disabled people. Dominant research traditions and values have been seriously criticized especially by disabled scholars in an attempt to produce a shift in thinking over the nature and purpose of research. In relation to the struggle for inclusivity the extent to which research can be an empowering and enabling force in the lives of disabled people is a topic of fundamental importance. It is the issue that I will briefly explore in this article.

[1]  T. Shakespeare,et al.  Defending the Social Model , 1997 .

[2]  L Elton.  Educational research: Policy-making and practice , 2003 .

[3]  Leyla Neyzi,et al.  The ethnographic imagination , 2006 .

[4]  A. Gitlin,et al.  Teachers' Voices for School Change: An Introduction to Educative Research , 1992 .

[5]  Colin Barnes,et al.  What a Difference a Decade Makes: Reflections on doing ‘emancipatory’ disability research , 2003 .

[6]  Michael Preston-Shoot,et al.  Whose Project is it Anyway? Sharing and shaping the research and development agenda , 1996 .

[7]  J. Morse.  Interpreting qualitative data: Methods for analysing talk, text and interaction , 1996 .

[8]  G. Zarb,et al.  On the Road to Damascus: First Steps Towards Changing the Relations of , 1992 .

[9]  Joanna Bornat,et al.  Reflecting on Research Practice: Issues in Health and Social Welfare , 1994 .

[10]  Paul Abberley.  Counting Us Out: A Discussion of the OPCS Disability Surveys , 1992 .

[11]  M. Oliver.  Changing the Social Relations of Research Production , 1992 .

[12]  J. Ryan,et al.  The Politics of Mental Handicap , 1980 .

[13]  C. Barnes.  Disability and the Myth of the Independent Researcher , 1996 .

[14]  Bob Heyman,et al.  Life History or 'Case' History: the objectification of people with learning difficulties through the tyranny of professional discourses , 1997 .

[15]  William Foote Whyte,et al.  Learning From The Field: A Guide From Experience , 1984 .

[16]  Jan Walmsley,et al.  Normalisation, Emancipatory Research and Inclusive Research in Learning Disability , 2001 .

[17]  D. Goodley.  Tales of Hidden Lives: A critical examination of life history research with people who have learning difficulties , 1996 .

[18]  T. Booth,et al.  Think of the children: growing up with parents who have learning difficulties , 1998 .

[19]  Colin Barnes,et al.  Disabled people and social policy from exclusion to inclusion , 1999 .

[20]  S. Beazley,et al.  Researching Disability Issues , 1998 .

[21]  M. Rioux,et al.  Disability Is Not Measles: New Research Paradigms in Disability. , 1994 .

[22]  Robert G. Burgess,et al.  Strategies of educational research : qualitative methods , 1985 .

[23]  D. Goodley,et al.  Doing Disability Research: Activist lives and the academy , 2000 .

[24]  bell hooks,et al.  Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , 1989 .

[25]  Jenny Morris.  Personal and Political: A Feminist Perspective on Researching Physical Disability , 1992 .