Visualising disability and activism in Second Life

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnographic study of identity and disability in the 3D environment of Second Life (SL), this article documents the authors' discussions with many regular users (known as 'residents') of SL who identify as having a disability or impairment in their 'actual' (off-screen) lives. Since SL offers the possibility of anonymity, regular users with a physical impairment may decide when and where to disclose or highlight their disability or whether to do so at all, when they are in world. Many also use the potential of SL to negotiate and challenge conventional media representations of embodied difference through their avatars. In this article the authors argue that the choices of representation reflect the residents' understandings of their own sense of 'authenticity'. For some, this involves a self beyond the limitations of physical embodiment -a metaphysical separation between body and mind. For others, the 'real self' is inseparable from a physical embodiment which includes the impairment or disability. These choices of how the users portray their avatar selves through a more fluid understanding of self-representation also offer potential for political and social advocacy beyond the virtual world. Article at RMIT UNIVERSITY on August 16, 2015 csi.sagepub.com Downloaded from 2 Current Sociology I'm trying to be as transparent as I possibly can and my Second Life directly relates to my Real Life 1 and vice versa so on good days I will use a walking stick or nothing, and on not so good days I will be in Second Life in my chair just like I would be in real life. (J

Disabled youth participation within activism and social movement bases: An empirical investigation of the UK Disabled People’s Movement

“…The collective organisation of disabled people is well documented within Disability Studies (Beckett, 2006; Bloustien and Wood, 2016; Sépulchre, 2018) and grey literature (Angelova-Mladenova, 2019). Claims are made to assert that disability resides as the unnecessary restrictions imposed upon people with impairments, health conditions and diagnostic labels.…”

Customizing Your Demons: Anxiety Reduction via Anthropomorphizing and Destroying an “Anxiety Avatar”

“…Users of popular VEs such as Second Life (SL) are increasingly creating avatars that convey less desirable, but no less integral, self-concepts ( Stewart et al, 2010 ). For example, Bloustien and Wood (2013 , 2016) recent work identified a growing segment of SL users creating avatars that exhibit their physical disabilities (i.e., avatars representing the disabled self-concept). Where creating an avatar representing the disabled self can be beneficial to the user by fostering self-worth (see Dunn and Burcaw, 2013 for a review of disability identity), the implications of creating an avatar rooted in undesirable, mental health-related self-concepts (e.g., anxiety) remain ambiguous.…”