specialcollections@tulane.edu / Wheelchair Life: Disability and Black Survival in the Afterlife of Gun Violence is about how gunshot survivors in New Orleans manage their lives and shape their identities after being shot and paralyzed. Following a group of wheelchair users with gunshot induced spinal cord injuries who self-organized into a social network around their devotion to New Orleans parading traditions, this ethnography explores how disability identities are mobilized within the existing stakes of Black survival in the United States. In the racially segregated city of New Orleans, urban gun violence and the wider traumas that are experienced in its aftermath are an immeasurable disruption to Black lives and Black futures. A focus on gun homicides has ignored the life worlds of the injured, particularly those of young Black men, whose experiences are obscured by the legacies and continued violence of anti-Black racism and criminalization of the urban poor, which renders gunshot survivors as guilty or deserving of the violence that happened to them. What does it mean to survive when your survival is a problem both in the sense that you were not expected to survive and your status (as a survivor and a victim) is unacknowledged? “Wheelchair Life” details the varied ways spinal cord injured gunshot survivors contend and contest these realities of social neglect and invisibility, by claiming new forms of mobility and disabled embodiments in public space and forging new modes of caretaking and relationships that enable the “wheelchair life” to be about more than just surviving. / 1 / Daniella Santoro
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_122502 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Contributors | Santoro, Daniella (author), Masquelier, Adeline (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts Anthropology (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, pages: 296 |
| Rights | 12 months, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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