Shogai to iu keiken o Rikai suru (Understanding the Experience of Disability: Approaches to Society and the Individual)

This book is a translation of Dunn, Dana S. (2019). “Understanding the Experience of Disability.” (Oxford University Press). I contributed Chapter 1, "Understanding the Experience of Disability," and Chapter 3, "Judging Disability." Based on Chapter 1, which explains the book's approach and overall structure, disability has often been reductively viewed as an individual problem. The book's purpose is to move beyond such simplification and demonstrate, from the perspectives of social psychology and rehabilitation psychology, how to illuminate the experience of disability by focusing not only on personal factors but also on social factors. It particularly aims to challenge 'essentialist' views. Essentialism is the tendency to view people or things as possessing an essential, unchanging nature, leading to the perception of disability as defining "the whole person." This book advocates for understanding disability as merely one characteristic among many. It examines how the experience of "disability" is shaped by exploring a wide range of themes, including attitudes and biases toward people with disabilities, gender and cultural backgrounds, workplace and family relationships, and connections to policy.
 
This book is structured into four parts comprising 22 chapters, with a key feature being the broad coverage of diverse topics within each part. Part I, "Established Areas of Inquiry" addresses themes with long-standing research accumulation, such as stigma, prejudice, and bias toward disability. For example, Chapter 2 examines "Disability Stigma," organizing perspectives from both perceivers and individuals with disabilities and exploring challenges toward its reduction. Chapter 3, "Judging Disability," examines research on judgment biases toward people with disabilities from both social psychology and rehabilitation psychology perspectives, demonstrating how cognitive and judgmental biases influence perceptions of disability.
 
Part II, "Mainstream Topics," covers perspectives that have gained particular attention in recent years, such as the experiences of women with disabilities (Chapter 8), intersections with culture and race (Chapter 9), and the relationship between aging and disability (Chapter 12). Part III, "Emerging Issues," focuses on perceptions of disability in the workplace (Chapter 13) and the interaction between individual factors like self-determination and resilience and the social environment (Chapters 18 and 19). Part IV, "Issues of Injustice, Advocacy, and Social Policy," addresses institutional challenges and practical perspectives through social injustice related to disability (Chapter 20), advocacy (Chapter 21), and the intersection with policy, particularly in the United States (Chapter 22).
 
At the end of Chapter 1, a message summarizing the entire book is presented. It states that among the factors affecting the lives of people with disabilities, the disability itself is only one factor, and its impact is relatively small. It also points out that viewing the lives of people with disabilities from a broad perspective is beneficial for both people with and without disabilities.
 
This book moves beyond the individual model of disability, which views disability as a "personal problem," and offers a perspective that understands disability multifacetedly within its social context. Its content is widely applicable not only to people with disabilities themselves, but also to supporters, family members, professionals in education, welfare, and administration, as well as students studying psychology or sociology. I hope this book will serve as an opportunity to consider disability from a perspective different from that previously held by the reader.
 

(Written by KATSUYA Noriko, Project Assistant Professor, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology / 2025)