In Disability, Self, and Society (2003) Tanya Titchkosky shares her experience of living with two disabilities, her own dyslexia and the blindness of her partner Rod Michalko (p. 1). The author does not disregard her partner's blindness but mixes it together with her dyslexia as a methodological device for making her way through the lived experience of disability and its meaning. The combination of these experiences serves as the experiential support of this book. Throughout, the author writes of her partner's blindness, of the disabilities of others, of how non-disabled people experience disability, of how institutions and organizations treat disability.
I review the book from my experience in various disability programs, and being a development practitioner for non-profit organizations working with people with disabilities in Southeast Asian countries. I've observed at the grassroots level public perception of people with disabilities as a burden on society; indifferences and rejection were major concerns of my findings too. People often segregate people with disabilities from community development components due to their lack of knowledge on disability issues, negative attitudes towards people with disabilities, and absence of positive awareness program interventions.
In her book, Titchkosky makes a tremendous effort to clarify the way in which non-disabled people, organizations and other institutions experience disability through their cultural perspectives. Drawing on her experience, she provides clear examples of how able-bodied persons perceive visible and invisible disabilities. If a person with dyslexia drives on the wrong side of the road, as Titchkosky did, this is usually blamed upon error rather than her disability. At the same time, she illustrates a moment when her partner Rod Michalko took a long time to find the door of the taxi and the driver responded, "It's such a shame. How terrible. You know, there's nothing worse than being blind" (p. 9). This incident leads Titchkosky to the idea that "disability is simply and obviously a bodily phenomenon" (p. 16).
In a recent study of understanding disability, Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare (1999) state, "To have impairment was regarded as a 'personal tragedy' — a conclusion which united service providers, policy makers and the wider public" (p. 10). The authors also comment that such community perception existed during the 1970s (p. 10). However, the current situation is different. The United Nations nominated the year 1981 as the International Year of Disabled People, and proclaimed 1983-1992 as the Decade of Disabled People. Although this legislative action somewhat reduces the amount of discrimination experienced by people with disabilities at certain levels, people on the day-to-day level still see disability negatively. Titchkosky's observation of the taxi driver's comment towards Rod Michalko brings us further to understanding how an able-bodied person on the day-to-day level sees a person's physical disability.
The author and her partner Michalko were living in a small university town, Antigonish, Nova Scotia (p. 46) for about five years during the time covered by the book. In this small university town, new students look for jobs in the summer and many tourists come to visit. They receive verbal and pictorial maps of the town. Different maps represent different geographical meanings that a place holds. The author uses these maps together with her experience, as well as her partner's blindness, as a methodological tool to view people's perception of disability. She points out that our culture represents "many different maps of various things, including disability" (p. 47). For instance, government officials use maps as a tool to identify people with disabilities necessary to qualify for a disability pension. Some maps locate what part of a person is made up by disability. Titchkosky describes her disability experience through the representation of mapping and categorizes disability and its interactions among the vast population. By making use of her experience of dyslexia and her partner's blindness, the author makes an effort to do a mapping of some of the widespread maps of disability.
The author interprets both disability and people with disabilities with the physical environment and states, "physical and social environment is exclusionary" (p. 97). In order to define the situation, the author cites an example of her university campus experience: it is usual to groan while opening the heavy entrance doors of the Sociology department building. She refers to this struggle with the doors as a public announcement that this environment is suitable only for a person who has the ability to move easily, as well the strength necessary to secure entrance to the building. The author experiences this physical and social environment as an exclusionary state for people with disabilities.
Titchkosky interprets the National Building Code of Canada's term "partial provision of accessibility" in the way that disabled means the person whose presence is partially expected. She emphasizes that even from the highest administrative standpoint, the physical environment of the disabled still remains inaccessible (p. 99). The author is very successful in interpreting her interactions with others in society. For example, she had a discussion with a senior professor at the Cape University who spoke about his interest in the handicapped. He then said that the University does not encourage the handicapped to come study here, as it is not accessible for people with disabilities. In reference to this conversation, the author makes us understand how knowledge about people with disabilities is created and directly linked to physical environment. The author also points out that higher educational institutions still perceive students with disabilities as an extra expenditure due to special accommodation, wheelchair ramps, elevators, signage etc. (p. 98). The reorganization of teaching methodology requires more funding (p. 98). She interprets the case of spending money for people with disabilities as minimum value, and minimum output but higher expenditure. As a development professional with years of experience working for people with disabilities, I interpret the author's statement in a different way. The issue here is not the expenditure; rather, it is the percentage of returns against investment for accessible environment. However, this is the community's misconception about people with disabilities. Consider a community where both disabled and non-disabled people are living together and we need to ensure equal opportunity and full participation for all. It is imperative to think about equal opportunity for all people in a community, without integrating people with disabilities. Therefore, there should not be any question of spending money for accessible environment.
Above all, the book is a valuable contribution to understanding people's perception of disability. It is fluently written, supported by examples, and includes interdisciplinary scholarship. However, readers may raise questions about this book, one of which may involve the issues of women's roles in the field of disability and finding any gap within feminist theories that exclude issues of disability. Other questions that may arise have to do with learning disabilities. While initially discussing the problem of disability, she focused more on learning disabilities as a major problem in general. However, in the latter part of the book, there was no significant discussion of learning disabilities.
The book Disability, Self, and Society is a courageous contribution to the social sciences, especially in the field of disability. I strongly recommend that Disability, Self, and Society would be a great resource for researchers, students and professionals, and those who are new to this discipline, as well as those willing to contribute to the socio-economic development of people with disabilities.
- Barnes,C., Mercer,G., & Shakespeare, T. (1999). "Understanding disability". In Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction, 10-38.
