Disability language, derogatory contexts

Presenter: Ellah L'am-Shaw

Presenter Status: Undergraduate student

Academic Year: 22-23

Semester: Spring

Department: Anthropology

Funding Source/Sponsor: Class Project

President's Strategic Plan Goal: Diversity and Social Justice

Abstract:
This project will talk about how people outside of the disabled community and the lexicon that these people use to refer to this community. It has been a common practice up until pretty recently for people outside the disabled community to refer to disabled people and disabilities themselves in a very derogatory way. The subjects that I am going to study are people who identify as having a disability whether it be physical, emotional, mental, or intellectual, how people who do not have disabilities refer to them and their capacities, and the contexts that these derogatory terms appear within the disability Twitter corpus. In more recent times there has been a movement to shift the language that is used to be more mindful and aware of people with disabilities, to make the language more inclusive and accepting. This is part of the debate between identity first versus person first language. There are two sides to this coin, on one hand, the person-first model seeks to not define the person by their disability because that negates the idea of the person as an individual and portrays them as being a victim of their situation (Dunn, Andrews 2015, 259). Then there is the other side of this coin which seems to embrace the labeling and seeks to frame it in a positive way and in so doing it places people with disabilities in their community (Dunn, Andrews 2015, 259). In terms of how many approximately 30 if I can get enough data from youtube and other testimonials. I am going to try and get as much diversity in terms of controlled variables even though that might be a bit harder to control when collecting data that is already in the public domain because the population demographics have already been chosen. In terms of what I am looking for, speech patterns or certain words that have a pejorative connotation. Given that a lot of my data has already been taken I am expecting to find a lot of words such as lame, retarded, or diminutive terminology.