Event: Disability and Social Networks in Education

On Wednesday February 8th 4.00-5.30 pm, I’ll be presenting to the Technology Mediated Learning Group at King’s College London (Waterloo campus). The seminar is free, and usually comprises 45 minutes of presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion. I’ve submitted the following abstract, developing positions from my PhD research with a view to several channels of publication. If you’d like more details or to register to attend, please get in touch with Mary Webb to reserve a place.

Disability and Social Networks in Education

In the UK social networks have become near-ubiquitous. Social networks offer spaces for interaction and display that permeate all aspects of public life. They are now deeply enmeshed in the real world. As these networks ‘fade into the foreground’ questions are raised concerning the impact of network effects and how these colonise the self, giving rise to new subjectivities. Social networks have been considered from diverse theoretical perspectives; however, I will argue that it is thought the lens of critical disability studies that the most significant fallout of the networked-self emerges.

Much has been written about technology’s ability to ameliorate disability by removing the physical and social barriers that exclude students with cognitive and physical impairments. However, attention to accessibility alone ignores the ways in which social networks produce and suppress disabled identities. In this presentation, I will advance a Foucauldian perspective and use evidence from doctoral research to demonstrate how network conditions depend upon and evoke a state of normalcy, propelling users towards disabled or non-disabled subjectivities. In this way, all users are ‘disciplined’ by social networks and compelled to adopt non-disabled interactions, or maintain disability within strict discursive limits. Amongst those who adopt non-disabled interactions, an ontological rupture occurs that confirms disability as a deficit, discredited identity. Amongst those who cannot, or will not perform a non-disabled self, the network is experienced as punitive and disabling. In each case, authentic and diverse experiences of impairment become inhibited. Social networks produce disabled subjectivities whilst systematically erasing them from view.

In this presentation I will discuss the resulting invisibility of disability in social networks. I examine a digital divide that is barely perceptible, to challenge a discourse of technology that promises engagement and inclusion whilst simultaneously quantifying, itemising and excluding the disabled individual.