https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3334-3806
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ABSTRACT
Disability in anglophone media, film and culture is often depicted in ways that rarely recognise people with disabilities as whole human beings. This creates deficit perceptions on what it means to live with a disability. Through the use of photo-voice, fifteen working-class coloured men living with paraplegia in the townships of Cape Town – South Africa, created photo-stories depicting the ways in which they think main-stream society sees them and the ways in which they see themselves. The analysis of their photo-stories was used to contribute to a discourse on photo-voice as activism. The photo-stories raise social awareness on the ways in which disability is socially (mis)understood and (mis)represented in their communities. This work contributes to the development of the affirmative model (Swain & French. 2000 Towards an affirmation model of disability. Disability & Society, 15(4), 569–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590050058189) and the active model of disability (Levitt. Citation2017. Developing a model of disability that focuses on the actions of disabled people. Disability & Society, 32(5), 735–747. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1324764). The thought-provoking photo-stories tell a narrative on reclaiming self-identity and redefining deficit meanings of disability. Ultimately, this work illustrates how powerful and radical the use of photo-voice can be as an epistemological tool for social change, representation and transformation.
Acknowledgements
I will forever be indebted to the men who participated in this study. My appreciation goes to the academic supervisors who guided this project: Dr Rachelle Chadwick, and Dr Gideon Nomdo. Thank you to my teachers who provided insightful feedback on this work: Dr Athena-Maria Enderstein, Dr Lorraine Nencel, Dr Phoebe Kisubi, Dr Frederik Behre, and Sian Halas. I would like to express my gratitude to Daniel Rautenbach who curated the exhibition with me, and Liese Kuhn for her expertise in photography. Thank you to the Department of Art and Culture who funded the exhibition. To the reviewers and editors of this special issue, I appreciate the constructive feedback that elevated the sound of this work. This research study received ethical approval from the African Gender Institute and Department of Gender Studies review board (IRB) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). All participants grated informed consent for the photo-stories to be published.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Translated as ‘the broken one’ and is a nickname for the South African paraplegic team.
2 The coloured racial identity refers to people of mixed racial origins who were not White enough to be classified as White and neither Black enough to be classified as Blacks (Adhikari, Citation2005).
3 An acute, traumatic lesion of the neural elements of the spinal cord that results in temporary or permanent loss of sensation and motor deficit that causes paralysis from the waist of the body downwards (Sakellariou, Citation2006).
4 During apartheid, coloured people were forcibly removed from areas in Cape Town by the Group Areas Act. This act restricted coloured and black people to townships on the Cape Flats.
5 Follow the link to view a short video of the exhibition: https://vimeo.com/288057032.