A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

Chapter 6: Media Representations
Introduction
In carrying out unstructured interviews on media representations of disability I aimed to
create opportunity to allow each of the research participants to shape the form and content of
our conversations. I did not have a stock opening question but got the interviews underway
with invitations along the following lines:
159
...we‟re here to talk about media representations of disability and disabled people…
and, I suppose, the way you perceive these representations impacting upon everyday
life… whether your everyday life or other people‟s… (Charles, l.2:09ff.)
My aim was to find out about participants‟ perceptions of and responses to media narratives
around disability in order to reflect on these as resources used by disabled people in identity
construction. I also aimed to discover whether participants regarded media representations of
impairment as invariably portraying disability as personal tragedy, materialising an
individual model of disability. Where the conversations led was very much down to the way
each person being interviewed approached the subject, and I was pleased to find that
participants responded in various ways. While most interviews took the form of
straightforward discussions, some people wanted to talk solely as consumers while others
wanted to talk about their own experiences of engagement in media production. While the
majority of conversations focussed on TV some people also talked about radio, print media
and the internet. Charles had prepared a series of video clips which he played on his laptop
and our discussion was directed at these. Surinder produced a number of newspaper stories
and images about her involvement with the MS Society and our talk centred on these.
Horizons
Drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Tony Wilson uses the term horizons to
describe:
frameworks of cognitive knowledge underlying perceptual experience, allowing
aspects of that experience to be recognised and identified as instances of types
already encountered (Wilson, 2005:16).
Horizons of experience are always learned culturally and intersubjectively and validate
established ways of recognising and relating to things and people. They are fixed, Wilson