The quality or condition of being a person, personhood is concerned with what constitutes a person. There are implications for abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, legal rights, and artificial intelligence.
Category Archives: Theories and Models
Sociocultural Model of Impairment-Disability
The sociocultural model views human experience as a product of culture and ideas. Disability in this model appears as an interaction between certain impaired bodies and their surrounding cultural environment.
Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of meaning-making, the theory of signs and symbols. Cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. Looks at the degree of and types of integration-exclusion of disabled people, which is played out on several cultural levels: biological, social, medical, ethical, religious, etc.
Disablement Process
Proposes that we “adopt the term disablement process, widespread in European science and policy, into American discourse in place of disability in order to emphasize the social and processural dimensions.”
Liminality Theory
Physical disability functions in modern society as a status betwixt and between everyday assumptions about “normal” physical strength and functioning. This creates a situation of permanent liminality, or a failure to be incorporated, in hypermodern society
Stigma Theory
Social stigma is the extreme disapproval of a person or group who differs from the cultural norms of another group.
Social Complexity Theory
In small scale societies, a physical impairment does not come to define one’s entire social identity because the individual in small scale societies is related and connected to others in many social roles and contexts.
Ecological Contextual Community Based Theories
The ecological approach concerns the complete environment (context and time): mind, body, social integration, the built environment, and the inherited environment.
Phenomenological Theories
Phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity.
Life Cycle Theory
Examines how essential life events relate to ‘transformations of status’ and to ‘roles’ in someone’s life. The Life Cycle Theory offers a critical, heuristic tool for use by ethnographers and others interested in the analysis of disability oppression.
Disquake 