4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 7: Debating Disability
Chair: Amy Rutstein-Riley
Genetics, Disability and Symbolic Harm
Elisabeth Gedge
Department of Philosophy,
McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
No abstract presently available
Making Sense of Disease, Disability, and
Trauma: Normative and Disruptive Stories
Valerie Raoul
UBC Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations,
Vancouver, Canada
This paper will report on some of the issues raised by a major collaborative project conducted at UBC over the last 5 years, for which I was Principal Investigator, entitled “An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma”. This project brought together a dozen specialists from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health Sciences, to look at how narratives of disease, disability, and trauma are used and analyzed. We also attempted to bridge the divide between academics undertaking research in these areas and community advocates, disability arts groups etc. Some of the results will soon be published in a collection of essays provisionally entitled Unfitting Stories. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on what we came to see as the three major functions of narratives of disease, disability, and trauma: the aesthetic, therapeutic, and polemic. Bridging sections deal with methods of narrative analysis across the disciplines, and the intersections of these three functions as well as the overlap between disease, disability, and trauma. This presentation will focus on problems that arise when engaging in cross-disciplinary discussions involving very different uses of the term “narrative” and a wide range of methods of dissection and interpretation of stories told by both patients and health care professionals. I will illustrate one way in which we managed to engage in effective dialogue by summarizing a multi-disciplinary approach to the way narrative functions in Margaret Edson’s highly successful play about a woman dying of cancer, Wit. Using a model for the functions of communication developed by linguist Roman Jakobson, we were able to better understand how this play can provoke very different reactions from the perspectives of cancer patients and their families, health care professionals, those with a religious faith, and academics engaged in literary or feminist research. It also serves, as a drama, to illustrate the differences between performance and performativity, when narrative representations deal with issues of identity and agency in relation to communication through language or other means.
Disability, Reproductive Interventions and Moral Consistency
Stuart Oultram
Centre For Professional Ethics,
Keele Hall,
Keele University, Unired Kingdom
Advances in medical and reproductive technology
and understanding now allow women who are both pregnant or who are seeking
to become so to influences what sort of child they have in one of two ways.
The first is directly through technological interventions such as ultra-sound
and amniocentesis, followed by selective termination.
The second is indirectly
through such things as dietary and lifestyle advice and subsequent alterations
to their behaviour.
However, it is only the direct form of influence
that commonly seems to attract both suspicion and objection.
In this
paper I argue that it seems impossible, or at the very least incredibly
difficult, to be opposed to the first kind of intervention without being
opposed to the second. In doing so will I examine but reject the objection
that because the first kind of intervention involves the termination
of an existent foetus, while the second does not, there is a moral difference
between the two.