The impact of mobility impairments on participation and interaction

Beskrivelse

The ability to walk is amongst neurotypical individuals an expected background feature of ordinary social interaction . Social activities and physical environments are arranged presupposing neurotypical mobility function and consequentially excluding individuals with mobility impairments from engaging with environments and participating in activities on equal terms with neurotypical individuals if they participate at all.

The International Paralympic Committee’s organization of wheelchair sports, and some institutions and organization’s provision of lifts and ramps for wheelchair users testify to the fact that mobility impairments impact social life and activities. This talk concerns how mobility impairments and resulting use of wheelchairs impact interaction and participation in sports activities in a sports high school in Denmark.

The talk is based on an ongoing study of sports students’ interaction with technologies (Sørensen et al., 2016), visiting researchers, instructors, teachers, and other sports students in the sports high school and in a sports lab at the University of Southern Denmark. Most of the involved students suffer from Cerebral Palsy (CP) (Colver et al., 2014). CP may impact cognitive functioning and abilities in speech, language, and communication (Clarke and Wilkinson, 2008). Additionally, it may impact physical functioning.

The talk concerns specifically aspects of how wheelchairs impact the users’ participation in social sports activities in the gym and in the sports hall in the high school. It examines how they configure interactional spaces (Mondada, 2013) that pre-begin face-to-face interaction and activities in interaction with non-wheelchair users. Additionally, it touches upon the co-participants’ practices for terminating interaction and dissolving established interactional spaces (e.g. Broth & Mondada 2013; LeBaron & Jones, 2002).

The study is situated in the framework which I have described elsewhere as EMCA studies of Atypical Multimodal Interaction (Rasmussen, (under review)). It directs its attention to how co-participants in Atypical Interaction configure focused and unfocused interaction (Goffman, 1963) by drawing on and orienting to talk, gaze, gestures, bodily movements, objects, as well as physical environments (Goodwin, 2011).

It draws on data, collected by the Tri-Disciplinary Contexture for research in Motion, Technology, and Humans (TRINITY) at SDU, in terms of video-recorded interactions in the sports high school. The recordings were transcribed using conventions for multimodal transcription (see e.g., Mondada, 2014; Hepburn and Bolden, 2012)


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Periode	27. jun. 2022
Begivenhedstitel	Atypical Interaction Conference
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Newcastle , StorbritannienVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International