Invisibility, Visibility, Vilification, and Near Silence: The Framing of Disability in the Early Years of the American Sociological Society
Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it
ISBN: 978-1-78635-478-5, eISBN: 978-1-78635-477-8
Publication date: 17 December 2016
Abstract
Purpose
Disability as a consequential social characteristic has not drawn sociologists’ contemporary attention in the way that race, class, gender, and sexuality have. In order to understand why, it is instructive to analyze how disability has been framed since the inception of the American Sociological Society, now known as the American Sociological Association.
Methodology/approach
Our findings are based on an intensive, systematic, and comprehensive content analysis of 10 years of the Proceedings from the American Sociology Society’s Annual Meetings, 1906–1915.
Findings
Three key themes emerged from the content analysis of the proceedings of the first 10 years of the papers delivered at the Annual Meetings (1906–1915). First, people with disabilities were largely invisible in those papers. Second, influenced strongly by a social reform agenda which stressed progress and the powerful eugenics movement of the time, those early presenters who addressed people with disabilities in their papers vilified them. Third, their denigration was met largely with silence in the printed commentary which followed in the proceedings.
Research implications
In order to understand the present limited attention to disability, researchers need to know the historical context.
Originality/value
Although there have been a number of thoughtful books, edited volumes and review essays exploring the history of the discipline of sociology, none of them have attended to the history of disability within the field. This paper contributes to that historical understanding.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgment
This work was supported, in part, by the American Sociological Association’s Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities in Sociology. We would like to thank Margaret Weigers Vitullo of the ASA for her tremendous support of this project which manifested itself in many different ways. We would also like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance provided by Vanette Schwartz and Josh Layden of Illinois State University’s Milner Library. Finally, we sincerely appreciate the assistance and support provided by journal editors, Sara E. Green and Sharon N. Barnartt.
Citation
Gerschick, T.J. and Stevens, J.D. (2016), "Invisibility, Visibility, Vilification, and Near Silence: The Framing of Disability in the Early Years of the American Sociological Society", Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720160000009003
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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