Browsing by Person "Cameron, Colin"

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Does anybody like being disabled? A critical exploration of impairment, identity, media and everyday experience in a disabling society.
(Queen Margaret University, 2010) Cameron, Colin
I offer a critical exploration of tensions experienced by disabled people in the construction of positive identities in everyday contexts in which self-understanding is shaped both by social structural relations of inequality and unique individual experience. The empirical evidence I use to develop and support my thesis involves data I have generated using a variety of data collection tools, through a series of interviews, conversations and observations carried out with sixteen disabled people across Scotland and England. I argue that while certain barriers to participation in ordinary community life may be being removed, perceptions of impairment as something ‘wrong’ with the bodies of disabled people remain embedded in dominant disability discourse. There is a structural purpose underlying the continued representation of impairment as misfortune, involving the ascription of a negative role – the disabled role – to those whose bodily configurations pose a challenge to requirements of conformity. Drawing on insights generated in my research, and building on an idea originally proposed by John Swain and Sally French in 2000, I have developed a clarified affirmative model of disability. This I intend as a tool to be used by people with impairments in making sense of the disabling social relations they encounter in everyday contexts, to be used alongside the social model in gaining knowledge to unsettle mainstream assumptions which can only recognise impairment as personal tragedy.
Further towards and affirmation model
(Disability Press, 2008) Cameron, Colin; Fontes, T.; Hemingway, F.; Soorenian, A.; Till, C.
Tragic but brave or just crips with chips? Songs and their lyrics in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain
(2009) Cameron, Colin
Disability culture is a site within which social and positional identities are struggled for and dominant discourses rejected; in which mainstream representations of people with impairments - as victims of personal tragedy - are held to the light and revealed as hegemonic constructions within a disabling society. Drawing upon styles that range from jazz, blues and folk to reggae, performance poetry and punk, disabled singers and bands in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain have been central to the development of an affirmative disability discourse rooted in ideas of pride, anger and strength. Examining lyrics by Johnny Crescendo, Ian Stanton and the Fugertivs - performers emerging as part of this movement in the 1980s and 1990s - this article considers the dark humour which runs through much of this work. It is suggested that these lyrics' observational reflections on everyday experiences of being oppressed as disabled people have been overlooked within critical disability studies to date, but are important in developing an understanding of positive disability identity as a tool available to disabled people in order to make sense of, and express themselves within, the world in which they find themselves.