UCLA

While anthropologists have long theorized disability, few studies have outlined the dynamics of communities centered around disability. This dissertation addresses this gap by providing an anthropological analysis of a disability community, attending to the daily, often creative, linguistic practices within these spaces. By examining the disability community at a public rehabilitation hospital in Southern California, this research explores disability as a process. Rather than approaching impairment as a classification of biological lack, this dissertation locates disability in everyday conversations and the interplay of historical, sociopolitical, institutional, economic, ethnic, and ability ideologies. It draws on and contributes to the fields of linguistic anthropology, disability studies, and the growing cannon of disability anthropology.

Through an analysis of the linguistic dimensions of stance and participant framework in the everyday language, I demonstrate that disabled people socialize each other into unconventional, sometimes subversive, orientations to each other and to impairment. I propose the theoretical concepts of “disability habitus” and “thick sociality” to describe the dynamics of the rich, historically grounded community at the hospital, where people come not just for medical care, but to participate. I argue that disability is an interactional process. I further argue that a history of disenfranchisement and biopower paved the way for the present neoliberal social context.

Analysis in this dissertation reveals that disability is generative; it opens new possibilities for interaction and subjectivity. This is the first study that endeavors to shed light on disability community in the context of rehabilitation. Rather than examining rehabilitation as practice of only trained (often able-bodied) medical professionals, this study takes an ethnographic approach to examine the sense of community among disabled people. This is important because research in the field of rehabilitation has not attended to the potentially transformative impact of disability community on people coping with injury.