Defining disability from within and in social interaction through the study of workplace settings

Among studies who contributed to social models of disability, research in
Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis shows, through detailed analyses of naturally occurring data, the way people with physical, cognitive and/or linguistic impairments do de facto experience disability in social interaction (Antaki & Wilkinson, 2012; Wilkinson et al., 2020). Indeed, rather than identifying and treating disability with assumed cognitive or physical states, this perspective focuses on participants’ interactional practices, as they act and perform actions with their bodies, in specific contextual and material configurations, and in cooperation with their interlocutors (see Goodwin 1995; 2003 on aphasia; Antaki et al., 2017 on learning disabilities; Maynard & Turowetz, 2017 on autism; Due, 2024 on blindness). In this paper, we expand on this line of research and present some preliminary observations on a large corpus of data which is being collected within the framework of a
Horizon European project (NewWorkTech, 2024-2027), which investigates how participants with different (dis)abilities interact and accomplish tasks in workplace settings while making use of different technologies. The populations included in the research are persons diagnosed with physical and/or cognitive impairments: blind people, wheelchair users, people with down syndrome and neurodiverse persons. The study is framed within Multimodal Conversation Analysis and is based on detailed transcripts of participants’ verbal and multimodal conduct. Though the analysis of selected sequences of interaction, we discuss etic and normo-centric perspectives on dis-ability and show instead if and how participants themselves, during their working activities and through their use of technologies, practically and interactively orient to dis-ability as such.
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