‘Falling through the cracks’: recognising sitting disabilities

Abstract

This article attempts to ‘give voice’ to those with sitting disabilities, in order to raise awareness and enable constructive dialogue amongst stakeholders. These voices were collected through interviews and conversational email correspondence, with participants recruited via support websites and hailing from across Europe, Australia and North America. Numerous themes emerged in our participants’ accounts and were largely framed around an inability to fit the deeply-rooted prevailing norms of a sitting society. Necessary shifts in relationships, an inability to travel, difficulties with retaining employment and feelings of distrust and inauthenticity in relation to official knowledges all emerged as a result of this. After an account of the participants’ stories, we offer a preliminary analysis via Nancy Fraser’s understanding of social justice, where these experiences can be understood through the categories of recognition and distribution. In doing so, we develop some recommendations for change.

Keywords:

• sitting disability
• chronic back pain
• social justice
• recognition
• distribution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants who willingly gave up their time and energy for this research. Their gratitude also goes to Mosken Bergh, who sadly passed in 2017. The authors hope they have helped, in some small way, the legacy that you left behind.

Notes

1 Such as, for example, the ‘accessibility icon project’ (http://accessibleicon.org/) and, in places, the use of signs on disabled toilets doors saying that ‘not all disabilities are visible’.