This article focuses on the communicative, cultural, and practical aspects of being a hard-of-hearing (HH) researcher who studies D/deaf people’s smartphone use through 20 in-depth interviews. This context presents the conflict between seeing deafness as a disability and seeing Deaf people as members of a cultural minority. This complexity of ‘subaltern-researcher’ concept combines with the limitations caused by conducting research as a marginal member of the academy, which in turn prompts the researcher’s conflict between the commitment to marginalized research participants and the able-bodied academic obligation to act according to able-bodied research, analysis, and standards for publication of findings. This paper suggests a reflexive description of identity, culture, senses, and communication, which interacts with the social responsibility of the disabled researcher, and the interviewees’ expressed agency. As such, this article contributes methodological and communicative insights on inclusive qualitative methods regarding both disabled participants and researchers.
Despite the increased technical accessibility of social media, disabled users’ attempts to be socially included are still understudied. These users’ agency-based choices are impacted by constant able-bodied surveillance and disciplining, especially when it comes to dis/ability visibility and potential context collapse. This paper develops the concept of disability performance within social media studies, presenting a qualitative study of social media users with concealable communicative disabilities: autistics, hard-of-hearing and people who stutter. Four factors were found to shape users’ dis/ability performances: the use of social media interfaces for the compartmentalization of disabled identity; users’ continuous efforts to make their social environment inclusionary; the centrality of users’ disabled identity and intersectionality; and the design of the performance’s message. Together, these show disability performances to be deliberate expressions of agency on the part of vulnerable social media users, who perform dis/ability according to their own evaluation of authenticity to increase their social inclusion.
The internet theoretically offers a socially inclusive space for disabled users and new forms of visibility vis-à-vis mediated communication. However, the prevalent perception of the internet as an idyllic space that liberates disabled people reflects an ableist mindset, as it views departure from the disabled body as the source of liberation. This paper challenges this perception by investigating how people with invisible disabilities that are clinically related to communication mediate their disabled life experience in Social Networking Sites (SNS). To this end, the study probed, through thematic analysis, 31 in-depth interviews with high-functioning autistics, stutterers and hard of hearing SNS users and 7 SNS documentation use diaries. The analysis identified a gamut of disability performances online, which varied based on one's perception of the disability and its visibility. For example, while some interviewees crafted a complex online persona that presented their disabilities through a nuanced perspective, others felt compelled to ‘pass’ as able-bodied. Many felt that their self-presentation was inhibited by a sense of social surveillance, imposed by the presence of friends from “the offline world”. The notion of “authenticity” posed another barrier for many interviewees: Sensing an expectation that their communicative style on SNS align with their physical communication led them to ironically adopt a less true-to-self persona by managing the visibility of their disability online to reflect their 'offline' constraints. Rather than providing an accessible and/or liberating sphere, this paper argues that social networking sites reproduce the ableist biases and power structures that underline the physical, “offline” sphere.
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