Enacting the socio-material: Matter and meaning reconfigured through disabled experience

Conceptions of disability tend to be dominated by a medical discourse, which considers disability as an individual, physiological, disorder to be treated or cured. From this perspective, a disorder is situated in the person and the solution to the problem caused by this disorder lies in treatment or cure to restore the body’s function. In this way, the individual(ized) body is cut off from the surrounding socio-material world. Critiques of the medical discourse place the body in a socio-material context, recognizing the interaction between the physiological condition of a person’s body and features of the context of his/her actions. They thus recognize the two-way relationship between a disabled person and a built environment, or, put differently, the mutual constitution of (the experience of) use and design. Disability is not conceived as an attribute—either of a person or the built environment—but as an effect, which implies a shift from static to dynamic understanding. Moreover, a shift is made from a representational standpoint to a performative movepoint. These shifts, now, have consequences for research into the (disability) experience of the built environment, and the understanding of its empirical outcomes. The paper aims to reconsider how the social—such as able-bodied normativity inscribed in the built environment—is not some sphere behind the material (i.e. the built environment), as an immaterial structure to be interpreted by those experiencing it, but how it is performed within and through a person’s experience of and interaction with the built environment. To this end, we explore how people living with various disabilities experience and relate to the built environment. The paper draws on a range of empirical material from ethnographically studies of disabled people’s experiences in relation to the built environment. The research involves persons who are born blind or lost their sight, persons having difficulty walking or using a wheelchair, and persons living with autism spectrum conditions. Given the extent to which these persons cannot detach themselves in a phenomenological way nor pragmatically from their embodied experience, we point out how matter and meaning coincide in their experience. Moreover, we point out how the perspective of disabled people may question socio-material configurations that tend to be taken for granted, and how this questioning may lead to reshuffling boundaries within these configurations. Subject to this reshuffling are boundaries in the material environment (e.g. boundaries between building elements), boundaries between material and people, and boundaries between (groups of) people. In line with the work of Ingunn Moser (2005), our study tries to “bring out and make visible and present the actually existing alternatives of socio-material configurations”. Because, the alternatives following disability experience are not outside of ‘the social’, they are as social as normal(ized) interactions, they just differently reassemble ‘the social’. In addressing the question of ‘the social’, our study thus suggests that it is not apart from or external to either person or built environment, but enacted in the relation between both.status: publishe