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

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A station is both a physical place where the social order is imposed upon an
individual and the social positioning (stationing) of that individual in terms of social
relations... Constructing a locale involves confronting, resisting or evading
imperialising power (Fiske, 1993:12).
Acceptance that one belongs in „places like these‟ with „others of my kind‟ involves an
acknowledgement of dominant disability discourse. Outwith these stations, though,
association with other disabled people is typically shunned in order to evade association with
what is perceived to be a devalued group, again an acquiescence with dominant disability
discourse (Goffman, 1976). Donna Reeve describes the situation of disabled people who
have learned that it is best „trying to excel and pretend that there [is] nothing actually wrong‟
(Reeve, 2006:103). The term „disabled community‟ cannot refer to all disabled people if
disabled people spend their time avoiding each other or disassociating themselves from this
identity.
It would be possible to consider the disabled community in terms of the disabled people‟s
movement, if our understanding of community is one that is grounded in shared
understandings as a result of some unifying characteristic (of being disabled by society)
(Barnes, 1997:9). However, this community is not one sustained by daily face-to-face
interaction (unless we consider small groups, such as staff groups in small voluntary
organisations) so much as through monthly or bi-monthly meetings, cultural events and so
on.
In relation to my research, to have looked to work with a group of disabled people in a
station, where I could have counted on having access to the same group of people on a
regular basis, while it may have made an interesting study would not, I felt, be likely to
produce the diversity of responses I hoped to gather. It might have been revealing in terms of
establishing why disabled people comply with dominant disability representations, but it
would have given a narrow answer to my question. Correspondingly, to have sought to work
with a group from the disabled people‟s movement would be likely to have resulted in shared
rather than divergent perspectives on the issues I wanted to explore.
Finally, whereas ethnography typically focuses on setting the accounts of individuals in the
context of their own culture and culture-sharing group, my aim involved setting these
accounts in the context of an oppressive dominant culture (Creswell, 2007).