Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CHAPTER 2
and dominance be contested, and the vapidity of these approaches be exposed.
Such an approach is not indefensible. It is part of a contemporary trend of
methodological shifts which challenge established research paradigms. For
example, Andy Knight writes in relation to multilateralism that:
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... [T]he intellectual approach to mulitlateralism is undergoing a shift from
the traditional (and problem-solving) rationalist to a reflectivist (and critical)
scholarship.
Using methods of enquiry that are hermeneutic, dialectic and reflectivist, in
contrast to the positivist and problem-solving approaches of rationalist
researchers. 116
Therefore, the emerging, yet constraining aporia between traditional applied ethics
and the disability context is not only confronted, but commands a creative
response. It will become apparent in later chapters that this aporia is not readily
recognised within the established traditional paradigms of applied ethics. A fuller
conceptualisation of the ethical significance of inclusion is evoked.
2.5.2 Creating A Methodological Metaphor
A challenge emerges as to how a researcher can best work with seemingly disjointed
fragments to construct an adequate explanation of the ethical significance of the
notion of inclusion. I have chosen to use metaphor to meet such a challenge. Johnson
argues, “The way we frame and categorise a given situation determines how we
reason about it, and how we frame it depends on which metaphorical concepts we
are using.” 117
imaginative cognition;” and opens up new dimensions of our moral understanding. 118
Gareth Morgan also claims that metaphor is often used as a device “for embellishing
discourse”; however, he continues, its real significance is much greater, for metaphor
“implies a way of thinking and a way of seeing that pervade how we understand our
world generally.” 119 Feminist theologian, Sally McFague states, “Metaphor is a
strategy of desperation, not decoration; it is an attempt to say something about the
unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, an attempt to talk about what we do not know in
terms of what we do know.” 120 Elsewhere she comments that metaphorical thinking
is “intrinsically perspectival”; for whilst we can derive similarities, we also
appears to belong to one particular context, but is used in another, as a semantic
tool to make visible certain traits that have remained invisible. 122
Lincoln and Denzin promote the methodological metaphor of the researcher as a
bricoleur, who not only cobbles together a new piece from used or historical
material, but who invents, like an artist, a new future through creative and
innovative uses of material. 123 He writes that metaphor “is one of our principal mechanisms of
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acknowledge dissimilarities. A metaphor, then, is a word or a phrase which
This is a similar metaphor to that evoked by critical
theorist, Levi-Strauss, in the 1960s. John O’Neill explains:
The bricoleur … moves into a neighbouring craft whenever the need to
improvise arises, a need able to be seen within the materials at hand although