Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2020, 56(1): 85-107 | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2020.004

'Tied to a wheelchair': How the absence of civil inattention Serves as a Spatial barrier to electric wheelchair users

Robert Osman¹, Hana Porkertová²

¹ Přírodovědecká fakulta, Masarykova univerzita, Brno

² Provozně ekonomická fakulta, Mendelova univerzita, Brno

The article is based on disability geography and draws on the social-geographic conception of relational space, which is perceived as being constantly created, never finished, heterogeneous, and embodied, and not a space that is given and everywhere the same. It offers a specific way of linking the discursive and material dimensions of disability, which intersect in the concept of social space, and refers to Lefebvre's trialectics of production - spatial practices, the representation of space, and spaces of representations. To analyse the mutual production of social space and social bodies, we use Goffman's concept of civil inattention. We ask how such social practices as gazing, addressing, asking, or dodging that co-create the social space of electric wheelchair users influence their movement through material space, and through the spatial reactions of wheelchair users responding to unwanted attention we trace the homogenisation and differentiation of space. The text is based on a long-term study (2010-2018) of the temporal/spatial behaviour of five electric wheelchair users (four men and one woman) diagnosed with muscular dystrophy who live in the City of Brno.

Keywords: disability geography, social space, Henri Lefebvre, civil inattention, wheelchair users

Accepted: February 28, 2020; Published: March 1, 2020Show citation