L’expérience de déplacement des personnes ayant des incapacités dans la Ville de Québec : pour une anthropologie ontologique du handicap

Abstract

This dissertation offers an anthropological enquiry on the question of dwelling of people with disabilities in relation to their mobility habits in Quebec City in Canada. It empirically examines the singular ways people travel through various daily commutes and paths, and how their dwelling habits are produced through the physical and social configurations and encounters composing these mobility experiences.The thesis proposes an ontological perspective of disability as it explores the reality of mobility of people with different abilities within the city's assemblages from their own situated perspective. It addresses perceptual person-environment relationships as well as the practices and production modalities of "places" by which people shape their world.The thesis pays attention to the questions of being and becoming within multiple assemblages of heterogenous elements and how the constitutive experiences of people are tainted daily with situations of disability and of social participation. The objective of the fieldwork was to realistically reflect the perspective of the people as they performed their ordinary activities.The thesis focuses on two groups of people, namely wheelchairs users and people with a visual impairment who use a guide dog or a white cane. It is through their situated perspectives, rendered in the form of ontographies of their daily commutes, that dwelling in the city is understood. From an anthropological perspective coupled with a strong philosophical inclination, since it is about dwelling (Ingold, 2000), becomings and assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), the thesis makes it possible to better understand the ways in which the individual existences of people with disabilities are constructed in environments that organize their possibilities by opening some and blocking others. By following people one by one, the thesis makes it possible to question the underlying conditions of inclusion, social participation, and the real exercise of rights in the city and to consider practices centered on the singular experiences of the world and their associated assemblages.