Reimagining the Good Life with Disability: Communication, New Technology, and Humane Connections

Abstract

Many deeply cherished notions of “the good life” are based on limiting notions of humans, things, and their environment. In particular, “the good life” is often imagined as a realm beyond illness, impairment, and especially, disability. This view is informed by deficit models of disability, which individualize disability rather than explore the “socio-cultural conditions of disablism” (Goodley, 2011, p. 29). With contemporary communication and new media, disability is even more seen as an impediment, barrier, or tragedy, to be overcome with digital technology. Regrettably, the widely shared experience of disability and its complex relationships with communication are only rarely seen as a resource for how we achieve “the good life,” in our own lives and societies, now and in the future. Accordingly in this chapter, we take up pressing yet sorely neglected questions of disability and communication in order to illuminate how we might see “the good life” in much more enabling, humane, and democratic ways.