Towards Enabling Geographies: ‘Disabled’ Bodies and Minds in Society and Space

Chouinard, V. Hall, E. and R. Wilton . 2010 . Towards Enabling Geographies: ‘Disabled’ Bodies and Minds in Society and Space . Surrey, UK : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd . 2010 ? pp. £60 (hbk ) IBSN 978-0-7546-0-7561-7 This book presents a “second wave” of geographical studies of “disability”, its preface proclaims, and thus a “shift toward studying and promoting the means of creating more enabling and empowering social spaces for disabled women, men, and children.” Its title was chosen, we’re told, to reflect “an underlying current present in many of the chapters.” And yet, across 265 pages and 14 chapters there is no prescriptive that asserts a means of improvement for the classes of peoples who, chapter by chapter, are presented as more or less ‘disabled.’ What would be ‘enabling and empowering’ is never made clear. Nor is the nature of ‘disability’ ever defined. The broad subject class seems to be constructed so loosely as to make disability—as adjective or noun—meaningless. This is geography because the word ‘spatiality’ is present on almost every page. And yet there is no map arguing either a limited, eccentric ‘disabled’ space. Nor is there a map promoting an enabled space that would empower the user. Mapping is not a necessary but is a typical constituent of geographies that propose spatial realities, a way to transform the idea of space and spatiality into a concrete, operational, and therefore potentially ‘enabling’ idea. The book’s coeditors explain in their introduction that the geographical ‘second wave’ began in the mid-1990s with a discussion on the nature of ‘disability’ in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. The result shifted the focus from the physical restrictions of persons with cognitive, physical, or sensory limits to the social mechanisms by which such persons are marginalized. This argument thus came to geographers perhaps a decade after the broad social model of disability was first proposed in other disciplines. The book’s theoretical base is thus very much that of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The authors and editors of this collection apparently are unaware that in recent years the social disability model has been attacked as simplistic and outmoded in a debate that has been sometimes acrimonious and broadly public. Instead, in their respective chapters the authors seeks to enlarge the categories of socially disabled persons from those with obvious cognitive and physical disorders (‘socio-emotional differences’) to include the obese, dwarfs, and seniors in general. These “Reflections on New Body Knowledges,” the final chapter insists, are a signal contribution of this book. The ‘first wave’ of geographical concern attempted to grapple with some very practical problems. Reginald G. Golledge, for example, a blind geographer, suggested that travel is so distinct an experience for persons with sensory (or mobility) differences that the urban space in which they travel is experientially distinct. The nature of that distinction, if real, and how it might first be demonstrated and then, perhaps, ameliorated, has been the subject of an extensive and recently reviewed literature.1 This literature has sought, in many of its parts, a demonstrable spatial effect on the personal and professional worlds of persons with specific conditions (blind, paralysed, etc.). In this book we learn that dwarfs have trouble reaching high ticket counters; persons in wheelchairs sometimes have trouble accessing buildings; the obese find themselves in too-small commercial seats; and caregivers living hundreds of miles from siblings with Down syndrome find the distance an impediment to certain types of interpersonal care. None of this is revelatory. Nor are these revelations particularly spatial in the sense that geographers traditionally have used the term. Instead, ‘spatiality’ for these authors is devalued into a synonym for ‘worldliness,’ or ‘world weariness’, and in its constant repetition without precise definition becomes essentially meaningless. It is not simply that the result is unmappable but that its focus, purpose, and thus its grounding seems wholly unclear. The result would not have served in the sociology of disability literature of the 1980s but is offered here as a ‘new wave’ of social geography. The misfortune is that issues requiring urgent attention are ignored as a result. Principle among them is what do we mean by a ‘disability’? How do we distinguish naturally occurring cognitive, physical, and sensory differences from social attitudes toward them? How are those attitudes translated into spatial realities, and perhaps barriers? Are the elderly indeed somehow ‘disabled’ as a result of their age or is it that some over the age of sixty-five years have cognitive physical, or sensory limits that affect their engagement in the shared world? More generally, perhaps, how do social attitudes translate into impediments that restrict those with specific cognitive, sensory or physical deficits? If they are real, can they be demonstrated: mapped, perhaps? If demonstrable, in what conception of social justice does one argue their unfairness? None of these questions are raised or treated in this volume, which thus is neither particularly enabling nor geographic in its parts.

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