DISABILITY AND MEDIA ACTIVISM

This chapter provides an overview and introduction to disability and media activism. It also provides a brief introduction to understanding disability and associated categories, such as impairment, as socially shaped and culturally located phenomena that are as much subject to power relations as they are bodily and materially constituted. The chapter discusses the emergence of media activism, especially in the mid-twentieth century, across a number of key countries. It focuses on the transformations in disability media activism, associated with waves of digitally enabled and inflected activism from the 1990s onwards, through email, web culture and blogging, but especially gathering momentum with the advent of mobile and social media. The chapter considers the different affordances of various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, video platforms and visual cultures. It also focuses on the debates among disability activism concerning the politics and implications of different kinds of media.