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Making Bodies Matter
Published in Jamie White-Farnham, Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, Women’s Health Advocacy, 2019
While attempts to make preventive care more accessible to underserved populations reflect medicine’s commitment to serving all bodies, these efforts function as, to borrow a term from disability studies, accommodations because they attempt to retrofit a physical environment so others can participate (Michalko, & Titchkosky, 2009). This also extends to efforts to accommodate different body sizes and abilities, such as developing accessible exam tables, medical gowns, and speculums, all of which work towards making individual accommodations rather than designing an accommodating space (see Price, 2011). Similarly, retrofits reveal the assumptions about who uses the space. For instance, a wheelchair ramp makes buildings and other physical structures accessible to those in wheelchairs, but the need for the ramp itself reveals the designer’s guiding assumptions and ideologies about the bodies that use that space, namely ambulatory people. The wheelchair ramp is an accommodation because it retrofits a space that would otherwise be inaccessible because the original design neglected to account for wheelchair users.
Beyond the biomedical model of diabetes
Published in Joanna Ziarkowska, Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes, 2020
In his portrayals of twentieth-century Indians, Sherman Alexie frequently presents diabetes as a well-established element of the reservation landscape.1 In “One Good Man,” a short story from The Toughest Indian in the World collection, the powerful image of wheelchair ramps attached to reservation houses reminds the reader of the ineffectiveness of biomedical approaches to diabetes treatment and prevention programs; the ramp announces the arrival of a yet another disfigured Indian body ravaged by the disease and sentenced to death. As the story opens, a ramp is being built in the narrator’s house as his father has just had his feet amputated due to diabetes complications. The father’s disfigured body heralds further complications that cannot be cured and which, according to doctors, leave him with only six months to live. The language spoken by diabetes is one of decay, degeneration, and decomposition. It is also the language of symptoms taken from a biomedical model that successfully reduces individuals to definitions of disorders and their manifestations. When Atticus, the narrator, helps his father into a wheelchair he cannot remain blind to how much weight he has lost (“forty pounds in the last few months”), which he immediately juxtaposes with an image of his father from the past: He was a man who used to teach ballroom dancing, back when he was young and strong and financing his communications education at the University of Washington (he’d always meant to start his own radio station on the reservation).(215)
An in-depth understanding of the impact of the environment on participation among people with spinal cord injury
Published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2018
Feng-Hang Chang, Cheng-Han Liu, Hsin-Ping Hung
Challenges with transportation were also repeatedly spoken of by participants. For those who drove, the lack of handicapped parking spaces was a nightmare. The design of public transportation facilities also significantly determined whether and where individuals with SCI could go, particularly for those who did not drive. According to participants, trains and metro systems in some cities were well designed, but the percentage of low-floor buses was too low in some areas. Even for those low-floor buses, the wheelchair ramps were poorly designed and hard to use. These practical issues made it considerably challenging for individuals with SCI to fully participate in community life.It takes me too much time getting on and off the bus, and that makes the whole bus wait for me. This makes me feel embarrassed. (Brad)
Neighborhood Social Cohesion and the Health of Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Older Adults
Published in Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 2022
Yeonjung Jane Lee, Kathryn L. Braun, Yan Yan Wu, Seunghye Hong, Ernest Gonzales, Yi Wang, Mohammad Didar Hossain, Tyran M. Terada, Colette V. Browne
Different programs and policies may be needed to address these trends. For example, communities should be supported to develop neighbor-helping-neighbor and time bank programs (Baldwin & Willett, 2013; Collom, 2007). These initiatives depend on community volunteers to help others and can provide a range of services, from welcoming new members to the community to visiting regularly, to providing information and referrals, and to assisting with transportation, shopping, and landscaping. Home renovation programs can support aging-in-place by paying for and/or installing bathroom grab bars and wheelchair ramps. Caregiver training and support programs can help older adults living with family to stay within their homes and neighborhoods.
Exploring exercise participation and the usability of the adaptive rower and arm crank ergometer through wheelchair users’ perspectives
Published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2022
Rachel N. Wong, Ashley L. Stewart, Bonita Sawatzky, James J. Laskin, Jaimie Borisoff, Johanne Mattie, Carolyn J. Sparrey, W. Ben Mortenson
When I wheeled into [community facility], they had a step on an elevated platform that was the whole gym and you had to go all the way to the back to find a wheelchair ramp to get in. So right away, I can’t step over one foot high, so that’s the barrier to get in, and I can't step down to get out. But I would go in there and be like okay there is a whole wall of treadmills, I can't use those. There is a whole wall of ellipticals, I can't use those, but at the end there are two Concept 2 [rowers]. Well I know if I could transfer onto that seat, if someone held the seat, I could have a 5 minute workout.