Disability and Discourse Analysis

by Jan Grue

Disability studies has engaged with discourse analysis in key works both from the UK and the USA. While the perspectives and analyses of discourse analysis have proved well suited for exploring disability, however, its methods have not been sufficiently developed in a disability studies context. Conversely, discourse analysts have traditionally been concerned with social issues and fields in which asymmetric power relations, marginalization, and discrimination play a central role, e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all of which share many analytical features with disability. But although efforts have been made to integrate disability into the discourse analysis and conversation analysis canon, the link between the two fields needs to be strengthened. This ground-breaking volume contributes to this link by thoroughly applying the analytical vocabulary of discourse analysis to issues that are central to the field of disability studies. It strengthens disability studies by supplying case studies of representations and constructions of disability and disabled people in discourse, theorizes the role played by language in the social construction of disability, and makes disability a more salient topic for discourse analysts.

Genres: Disability

153 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 28, 2015

About the author

Author and academic.

My work deals first of all with embodiment - with what it means to be a body in an endlessly complex world. I've worked in various genres, combining literary exploration and elements of science fiction and speculative fiction, publishing five short story collections, a novel, and several children's books.

My book of autobiographical non-fiction, I Live a Life Like Yours, was first published in Norwegian in 2018. “The book will, in all likelihood, linger as a mile stone signifying that a new maturity is reaching autobiographical literature in Norwegian non-fiction,” wrote Morgenbladet’s Ane Farsethås. Dagbladet’s reviewer called the book ”a literary masterpiece that I recommend in the strongest terms!”, giving the book five stars. The book went on to win the Literary Critics’ Award and has been nominated to the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize – as the first Norwegian non-fiction book in 50 years. The English translation, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will be available in August, 2021.

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it and learned how much I appreciate a more Critical Discourse approach in disability.