This entry discusses the enactive-ecological (“EE”) approach to disability with a particular focus on recent scholarship of the lived experience of visual disability. After reviewing the five foundational concepts—embodiment, enaction, embeddedness, extendedness, and affordances—of the EE approach, two main frameworks are analyzed for their potential to do justice to the challenges faced by visually impaired (“VI”) and blind people and their communities. Shortcomings of both frameworks’ attempts to apply the EE approach are discussed and include a unidirectional evaluation of adaptive capacity (of the disabled person to a mainstream environment) that excludes community-level dynamics, a failure to see the utility of short-term instability to long-term change, and bias in the consideration afforded to disabled people as always already equal. Instead of falling into an individualistic analysis that risks pathologizing minority embodiment, the EE theory can be expanded by analyses that recognize the importance of affording equal consideration to minority bodies and worlds as a prerequisite to evaluation, of assessing adaptive capacity at the minority community level as well as in a reciprocal manner (of nondisabled people interacting with disabled people), and of socializing cases of adaptive failure by prioritizing an evaluation of embeddedness (the multi-level social context) and extendedness (objects for cognition) over enaction (fitness in environmental interaction). The role of nondisabled transformation in the process of systemic enablement is addressed with respect to the development of the nonvisual senses. An EE analysis of interabled situations with VI and blind people is offered to support this connection.

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Integrating Enactive-Ecological Theories of Disability in Visual Impairment and Blindness

  • Maria Ann Noland

摘要

This entry discusses the enactive-ecological (“EE”) approach to disability with a particular focus on recent scholarship of the lived experience of visual disability. After reviewing the five foundational concepts—embodiment, enaction, embeddedness, extendedness, and affordances—of the EE approach, two main frameworks are analyzed for their potential to do justice to the challenges faced by visually impaired (“VI”) and blind people and their communities. Shortcomings of both frameworks’ attempts to apply the EE approach are discussed and include a unidirectional evaluation of adaptive capacity (of the disabled person to a mainstream environment) that excludes community-level dynamics, a failure to see the utility of short-term instability to long-term change, and bias in the consideration afforded to disabled people as always already equal. Instead of falling into an individualistic analysis that risks pathologizing minority embodiment, the EE theory can be expanded by analyses that recognize the importance of affording equal consideration to minority bodies and worlds as a prerequisite to evaluation, of assessing adaptive capacity at the minority community level as well as in a reciprocal manner (of nondisabled people interacting with disabled people), and of socializing cases of adaptive failure by prioritizing an evaluation of embeddedness (the multi-level social context) and extendedness (objects for cognition) over enaction (fitness in environmental interaction). The role of nondisabled transformation in the process of systemic enablement is addressed with respect to the development of the nonvisual senses. An EE analysis of interabled situations with VI and blind people is offered to support this connection.