Habermas and the Dilemmas of Experience of Disability

What is it about?

The article addresses Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which offers very productive tools for analyzing disability. The Habermasian division of social reality helps examine positive and negative effects of tensions between the lifeworld of a person with disability and the system. By exploring such an individual’s communicative action, one can obtain an insight into his/her validity claims and disruptions in the communication process and self-understandings inscribed in group narratives. The study reported in the article used in-depth interviews, which narratively reveal the experiences of a person with disability in family, education, sports and labor. The key findings are, first, that the rationalization of lifeworlds of people with disability increases while processes in which they are colonized by the system intensify; second, that education and family are significant factors in the raising of validity claims; and third, that validity claims as tools of verbal communication should be augmented with arguments from non-verbal language (e.g. gesture, empathy, etc.).

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Why is it important?

The practical dimension of our research points to the possibilities of a more nuanced understanding of the experience of people with disabilities, especially when it comes to their relations with different institutions (social support, educational). The individuals’ lifeworld should always be analyzed on the intersection of systemic influences (i.e. school, club, workplace) and individual and group experiences in their daily life.

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