Invisible disability, public health, and visual social media communication

Abstract

People with disability are routinely excluded from public health campaigns (Kavanagh, 2020) despite that they account for approximately one in six Australians (ABS, 2019). People with invisible disability are an often-overlooked sub-group despite that they account for an estimated 90% of people with disability (Attitude Foundation, 2018) and that many invisible disabilities overlap with ill health. This thesis illuminates how a critical focus on invisible disability can improve the representation of people with invisible disability and forge new pathways for their inclusion in health campaigns on visual social media. It offers a conceptualisation and an operational definition of invisible disability that it uses as a critical lens. The thesis grapples with how to represent invisible disabilities on Instagram before drawing on two Australian government Instagram health campaigns as case studies: the NSW Healthy Eating Active Living (2020) campaign and national Girls Make Your Move (2016) campaign. It draws on elements of Briggs and Hallin’s (2016) biocommunicability theory and the concept of economies of visibility to examine both campaigns and to demonstrate how people with invisible disability are often excluded from Instagram health advice. It highlights how some of these exclusions may be underscored by broader tensions between certain invisible disabilities and biomedical knowledge and/or biomedical professionals. In response, it offers theoretical and practical suggestions about how to improve the representation and inclusion of people with invisible disability in visual social media health communications. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that a critical focus on invisible disability can challenge normative conceptions of health and encourage creative representation and inclusion strategies on visual social media beyond straightforwardly visually representing invisible disabilities.