Modes of ordering disability: students living with visual disabilities in the Sultanate of Oman^*

* This article was initially presented at Dilemmas for Human Services 2015: Organizing, Designing and Managing, conference in Växjö, Sweden in September 2015. It was revised based on the comments from the conference and later evolved into this article.

ABSTRACT

This article examines how a group of students with visual disabilities speak about becoming disabled and living with disability in relation to: material entities, practices, and their own expectations regarding the future in the Sultanate of Oman. It draws upon individual interviews among six adults with visual disabilities. The article outlines, from a material semiotics approach, how various forms of modes of ordering enact disability. An interdisciplinary approach, informed by disability studies and science and technology studies, is implemented to interpret: How do students with visual disabilities express the relationships between material entities (such as bodies and technologies) and practices? In what ways are these relationships enacting different modes of ordering disability? What kind of modes of ordering disability are the participants experiencing in their lives? How have they responded to the modes of ordering that they have encountered?

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• material semiotics
• modes of ordering
• Sultanate of Oman
• technologies

Acknowledgements

The researchers gratefully acknowledge the help of all people involved in the study who provided support in various ways and at various phases.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rebecka Näslund is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences at Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden. Her current research focuses on disability, gender, education, and technological access and use in the Sultanate of Oman.

Shariffa Khalid Qais Al Said is an educational expert with the Ministry of Education in Muscat, Oman. She holds a Doctorate in Education (EdD) from Columbia University, New York City, USA.

Notes

* This article was initially presented at Dilemmas for Human Services 2015: Organizing, Designing and Managing, conference in Växjö, Sweden in September 2015. It was revised based on the comments from the conference and later evolved into this article.

1. In this article, we talk about intra-actions instead of interactions. Intra-action is a concept developed by Karen Barad. She regards that intra-action compared to interaction pays more attention to how entities are enacted, thus for her, the entities are not pre-given as in the concept of interaction (Barad 2003, 815).

2. In the extracts from the interviews ( … ) is used in the text to indicate omissions from the original interviews and […] is used for presenting inserted alterations. Both the omissions and the insertions were done as a way to correct the interview linguistically, to not reveal the interviewees’ identity, and to ease the reading.