Normality and Disability: Intersections among Norms, Law, and Culture

by Gerard Goggin (Editor), Linda Steele (Editor), Jessica Robyn Cadwallader (Editor)

Hotly contested, normality remains a powerful, complex category in contemporary law and culture. What is little realized are the ways in which disability underpins and shapes the operation of norms and the power dynamics of normalization. This pioneering collection explores the place of law in political, social, scientific and biomedical developments relating to disability and other categories of ‘abnormality’. The contributors show how law produces cultural meanings, norms, representations, artefacts and expressions of disability, abnormality and normality, as well as how law responds to and is constituted by cultures of disability. The collection traverses a range of contemporary legal and political issues including human rights, mercy killing, reproductive technologies, hate crime, policing, immigration and disability housing. It also explores the impact and ongoing legacies of historical practices such as eugenics and deinstitutionalization. Of interest to a wide range of scholars working on normality and law, the book also creates an opening for critical scholars and activists engaged with other marginalized and denigrated categories, notably contesting institutional violence in the context of settler colonialism, neoliberalism and imperialism, to engage more richly and politically with disability. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Continuum journal.

164 pages, Hardcover

Published December 19, 2017

About the author

Gerard Goggin is the inaugural Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, a position he has held since 2011. Previous appointments include Professor of Digital Communications at University of New South Wales (2007-2010), the University of Queensland, Southern Cross University, and, as visiting professor, the University of Barcelona.

Gerard's research focusses on social, cultural, and political aspects of digital technologies, especially the Internet and mobile media and communication, and disability and accessibility. He has published 20 books and over 170 journal articles and book chapters.

As well as his academic roles, Goggin has had a twenty-year involvement in communications and telecommunications policy, including appointments as a board member of the Disability Studies and Research Institute (DsaRI), foundation board member of the peak organization Australian Consumer Communication Action Network (ACCAN), deputy chair of the self-regulatory body Telephone Information Services Standards Council (TISSC), and member of the Australian e-Research Infrastructure Council (AeRIC).

Gerard is a pioneering figure in mobile communication and media studies. His key books are Global Mobile Media (2011) and Cell Phone Culture (2006), as well as the edited collections Mobile Technology and Place (2012), Mobile Technology: From Telecommunications to Media (2009), and Mobile Phone Cultures (2008). In 2014, he will publish the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (with Larissa Hjorth) and Locative Media (with Rowen Wilken). Gerard edits the Oxford University Press Studies in Mobile Communication series (with Rich Ling), and is on the board of the Sage journal Mobile Media and Communication. Currently, Gerard is working with Sydney colleagues Dr Tim Dwyer and Dr Fiona Martin on an international project researching mobile Internet and its implications for media policy (supported by an ARC Discovery grant).

Gerard has a longstanding interest in Internet cultures and histories, as seen in key publications Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (2004), Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms (2009; with Mark McLelland), and a special issue of Media International Australia on Australian Internet histories (co-edited with Jock Given).

Gerard is working on a comparative, cultural history of the Internet in Australia and Asia-Pacific, with colleagues Mark McLelland (Wollongong), Haiqing Yu (UNSW), and Kwangsuk Lee (Seoul Tech) ? a project supported by an ARC Discovery grant. He is also a chief investigator on the ARC Linkage project Spreading Fictions: distributing stories in the online age, led by Jock Given (Swinburne), in collaboration with ABC and Screen Australia.

A key area of Gerard's research is disability, an interest he has had since working with disability activists and organizations in the telecommunications in the early 1990s. Gerard has an international reputation for his work with the late Christopher Newell, especially the prize-winning book Disability in Australia (2005) and Digital Disability (2003), as well as many papers on aspects of disability, society, media and culture. Gerard's book Disability and the Media (co-authored with Katie Ellis) will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

With Sydney colleague Dinesh Wadiwel, and Disability Australia Incorporated (PWDA), he is developing a disability rights research capacity, which aims to identify emerging rights relevant research needs within a changing political and social policy landscape, and share expertise between researchers and civil society practitioners (a project supported by the Sydney Social Justice Research Network).