The Category of Disability in Public Sphere

The International Laboratory for Social Integration Research

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THE CATEGORY OF DISABILITY IN PUBLIC SPHERE

The research analyzes the sociocultural patterns of the disability category as a discursive construct of the modern public sphere in the post-Soviet cultural context. The research question focuses on how the meanings and spaces of public conversation about disability are constructed in modern Russia in the last two decades. It is shown how the current revision of the J. Habermas and H. Arendt classical concepts of the public sphere can complement disability studies in the paradigm of the discursive model of disability. The blurring boundaries of public, private and intimate and the role of multiple publics with diverse modes of manifestation of the category are considered. The research reveals the growing importance of scandal as a discursive event and the space of production of disability meanings in the public sphere. The conceptualization of the category of disability is reinforced by the empirical data - expert interviews, case study of public scandals (2006-2017), analysis of media representations and narratives of people with disabilities. The author uses the informants’ language and meanings to identify the key conventions of a public conversation about disability, which, according to experts, have undergone significant changes over the past 20 years: cliches in institutional discourses, flexibility of definitions or withdrawal of any fixed convention (when disability is not considered as a prior resource for the identity project) in socio-cultural projects, autobiographies and narratives of persons with disabilities in social media.