Michalko and Titchkosky

Rod Michalko's and Tanya Titchkosky's very powerful chapter ("Putting Disability in its Place: It's Not a Joking Matter") in James C Wilson's and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson's Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, can force a wide readership to question the "pragmatism" that allows institutions to exclude disabled people. In their essay, they analyze a conversation they have with "Harry," a colleague who blithely informs them that "the handicapped" are not really welcome on his home campus. The juxtaposition of their conversation with Harry and the assumptions supporting his "common sense" approach to accommodations successfully critiques conventional discriminatory institutional practices - and by extension, and for our purposes here - discriminatory curricula designed with narrow, exclusionary assumptions regarding "normal." In other words, physical environments that need to retrofit with ramps, wider doorways, and Braille signage, were created under "pragmatic" ideologies that see disability as not normal. As Michalko and Titchkosky demonstrate, conversations and already-designed spaces reveal unspoken assumptions regarding the place of disability in society - its marginalization. In this ideology, pragmatics is unquestioned; exclusion is unquestioned. A barrier is something the disabled naturally have to overcome because "that's just the way things are." By exposing this ideology, Michalko and Titchkosky argue by implication that designing environments from the beginning to be more inclusive would do much to make the "disabled" more a part of "normal" society. This view is consistent with the goals of universal design.