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

Coventry, Northampton and London in-between. During the first series I carried out semi-
structured interviews in which I asked participants to reflect upon their own experiences and
about the way they related to the idea of disability. The second series involved unstructured
interviews in which participants talked about their perceptions of media representations of
disability as resources to draw on in making sense of their own experience. In the final series
I made as-it-happens observations of a variety of mundane activities in which participants
engaged as part of everyday life.
In order to gain a wide divergence of responses in my data I chose as participants disabled
people in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties; people from isolated rural and
cosmopolitan urban environments; people from LGBT and straight communities; people
from BME and white communities; people with and without religious faith; people with
physical, sensory, emotional and intellectual impairments; people who have been disabled
since childhood and people who have become disabled in adulthood; and, finally, people
who said they feel very positive about being who they are, people who said they see
disability just as part of life but not as something to go on about, and people who said they
hate the disability experience. My research is about disabled people‟s own perceptions of
their own situations. It is about how disabled people regard themselves in the light of ways in
which dominant non-disabled culture expects them to regard themselves.
Taking into account Andy Rickell‟s observation in Disability Now that only six per cent of
disabled people identify with the social model of disability, I cannot claim that my
participant group is quantitatively representative (Rickell, 2009). Five out of the sixteen
people I interviewed are emotionally and intellectually committed to the social model. But
as my purpose is consciously political I do not regard this as problematic. I start from a
position that no circumstance contains its own conditions of existence and that everything is
relational. Underpinning this research is a critical perspective which attempts to dig beneath
the surface of accounts in order to throw new light on the ways in which social structural
relations are experienced, resisted and transformed by disabled individuals.
I have adopted a hybrid approach in my use of theoretical sources, incorporating a wide
range of sociologists and psychologists whose most significant (if only) shared characteristic
is, perhaps, that they are „critical‟. For example, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu, Erich Fromm,
Sheldon Stryker, Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Friere, Henri Lefebvre, Fran Martin, Conrad
Lodziak, Alfred Schutz, Norbert Elias, Patchen Markell, John Fiske, Zygmund Bauman,
Anthony Giddens, Judith Butler, C. Wright Mills. In terms of Disability Studies theorists, I
make use of John Swain, Sally French, Mike Oliver, Colin Barnes, Mary Johnson, Allan
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