This qualitative study explored the experiences of people categorised as legally blind. Adopting a phenomenological approach, the study gathered four life stories of three recruited participants and my own story as a legally blind person. These case studies revealed that people who are legally blind traverse a borderland between sighted and blind worlds, a position which carries with it experiences that are vastly different than both totally blind and sighted people. Located in disability studies, the thesis examined the experience of legal blindness in a unique way, cross-fertilising the best elements of an American cultural studies approach with a British social model of disability. The British social model, rooted in sociological materialist analysis, is often positioned by its proponents as at odds with the United States humanities-based cultural or minority model of disability. This thesis sought to discover if a bridge could be built between the two models to allow for several theoretical analyses with the higher goal of understanding both phenomenological and social aspects of borderland blindness. Another original aspect of this study is the use of the postmodern metaphor borderland to carve out a geographical space unique to legal blindness -- a territory between sightedness and blindness where residents are pressed to migrate back and forth across its borders from situation to situation. The research developed a combination of social constructionism, materialism, postmodernism, and existential phenomenology, while aiming to meet the goals of emancipatory disability research. Participants told their stories in their own words, they chose what was important for us to know about them, and they maintained control over their stories throughout the research and write-up processes. The study was interested in how society treats blind people, and was also keen to know what meaning blind people made of such treatment. Its design strayed from orthodox disability studies research in that it wanted to learn and record the embodied experience of legal blindness as well as blindness identity formation. However, to examine physical aspects of blindness did not imply approval of ocularcentric medical model practices; both the American and British social models have at their foundations critical analyses of medicines control over the lives of disabled people. While this study utilised social constructionism as a primary method of analysis, it simultaneously challenged the binary of essentialism/social constructionism because impairment, disablement, and disability are complex and do not all fit into either stance. The experience of impairment is integral to understanding the lived experience of blindness. Further, the study rejected the blindness/sightedness binary which positions blindness as lack (Michalko, 1999), and instead, examined borderland blindness as a medically and legally constructed social category that is neither better nor worse than normal sight and vision, but is merely neutral difference. The research was conducted from an insider position because I wanted to learn how other legally blind people experience life in the borderland; and, in the tradition of disability studies and disability activism, I consider this work a political act -- a commitment to openly partisan inquiry (Barnes and Mercer, 2004). I was curious to explore the strengths, weaknesses, and complexities of conducting research as an insider as a member of the population of research interest. Another feature of this study was the application of Rogerian techniques of establishing an environment in which genuineness, trust, and unconditional positive regard would flourish; this model provided a natural marriage to emancipatory life story and insider research. The research findings conclude that there is no conflict between British and American social models of disability; and further argue that the two models enhance each other in that together they provide a more holistic examination of the everyday lived experience of disabled people. Use of both models strengthened inherent weaknesses that arise when each model stands alone. Furthermore, the findings suggest that more studies about blindness concentrate on legal or borderland blindness because this population has experiences that are vastly different from both totally blind and sighted people. These differences have significant ramifications for education, rehabilitation and other human service policy and provision.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/290328 |
| Creators | Omansky, Beth Fay |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds