Disability, Discourse and Technology ─ Agency and Inclusion in (Inter)action

Exclusion is the main predicament faced by people with disabilities across contexts and cultures, yet it is one of the least academically studied concepts. This book brings together past and new research to offer an applied linguistics perspective on critical and timely issues in disability research, filling in a number of gaps in discourse analysis and disability studies. Through analysis of various types of data collected as part of a longitudinal, ethnographic case study involving one Muslim Arab man with disability and members of his social circles, the book presents a new framework for the analysis of agency and inclusion in inter(action). The book illustrates the necessity of going beyond bounded texts when dealing with identities constructed by individuals with disabilities and the need to deconstruct taken-for-granted binary categories of what does and does not constitute disability and ability. It further documents the role that a seemingly dependent agent can play, in conjunction with caregivers, in combating the marginalization afforded to him by certain disability ideologies. On top of this, the book offers insight into how to conduct multimodal research that is empirically rigorous, theoretically grounded, socioculturally sensitive, and activism-oriented.

Najma Al Zidjaly is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. She is the editor of Building Bridges: Integrating Language, Linguistics, Literature and Translation in English Studies (2012), and is on the Editorial Board of Multimodal Communication.