'Bringing Visibility to Disability': Rethinking Childhood Disability Online

Digitally mediated social environments have become important stages for the negotiation of everyday life, and have fundamentally changed the way people interact, communicate, and perform identity. This qualitative study employed a case study methodology to critically explore how disabled youth can use new media technologies as platforms for constructing and communicating identity. Oriented by Goffman’s dramaturgy and critical disability studies, the investigation looked at videos that were posted on a disability-specific video sharing site between 2010 and 2014. The institutional discourses underpinning the website were explored using a frame analysis of a subset of 20 videos created for promotional purposes by the sponsoring institution or designated as winning entries in an annual contest. A critical discourse analysis considered the performative responses of disabled youths in 30 other videos that provided autobiographical, first-person accounts and in-depth interviews conducted with one of the video creators. The objectives were: i) to illuminate how disabled youths’ presentations of self both shape and are shaped by dominant knowledge and power structures regarding disability and ability, and ii) to critically explore the multiple effects of video sharing technologies for shaping understandings of disability in the public sphere. The findings highlighted how disabled youth managed an idealized impression of self through practices that reproduced, resisted, or disrupted dominant disability and ableist discourses. While the videos exposed how dominant discourses may be internalized by youth, they also legitimized and brought visibility to alternate ways of being that were unconstrained by normative ideals or underpinned by binary constructions of disability/ability. Video sharing can give youth who are frequently unheard an opportunity to provide an account of self in the public domain that asserts their existence and value in ways that might not be possible in face-to-face interactions. The findings suggest that online interactional spaces can play a role in shaping understanding about disability, and can offer disabled youth a means to influence interactions and understandings about themselves, their bodies, and their worlds.Ph.D