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Interdisciplinary Disability Studies (IDS)

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Chronicles of Second Life: Rethinking Diversity and Disability

By: Cassie Bellefleur, Hannah Boutin, Suzanne Bracco, Brittany Brown, Elizabeth Cohen, Jillian Farrell, Elizabeth Graham, Michaela Ham, Casey Jennings, Elizabeth Maliga, Kevin Mansfield, Michelle Newman, Nicole Oakes, Jennifer Pickering, Sarah Quinn, Meena Sanders, Cassandra Worster

DIS 450: Disability: Population-Environment Diversity

Course Overview

Consistent with contemporary literature and research in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies, students will examine and analyze disability as an interactive disjuncture between the environment, the human body and population groups. Students will analyze how environments shape and are shaped by disability and will focus on realigning bodies, populations, and environments to advance full participation, reduce personal and environmental harm, and preserve just and safe environments. Included will be natural, virtual, service, economic, social, policy, and community environments across the globe.

Chronicles of Second Life: Rethinking Diversity and Disability

Expanding the theoretical paradigm of diversity to incorporate, build on and advance beyond “bodies and backgrounds” to include the uniqueness all people provides many opportunities not only to maintain the important theoretical and applied gains that have occurred from civil rights concepts and movements, affirmative action, and other sub-population group-specific responses, but to create global environments that are welcoming to all people.

To experience the limitations of the “bodies and backgrounds” approach to diversity and to fashion new ideas that are relevant to the 21st century of blogs, robotics, and virtual interaction and memory practices (Bowker, 2005) students engaged in a semester-long assignment in which they became residents of Second Life, “an on-line virtual world imagined and created by its residents” (http://secondlife.com/).

Through this assignment students were asked to keep a diary that invoked and synthesized assigned literature on disjuncture, diversity, and legitimacy theory to frame their thinking about human difference, variation, and categorization.

The following questions guided student chronicles

1. Describe your activity and the environments which you visit, why and how did you select them?
2. How do you navigate and communicate on Second Life?
3. Describe and react to the appearance, behavior and your assumptions about other avatars. What type of people in the physical world do you think these avatars represent? Why?
4. How do you obtain information on people, events, and resources in Second Life?
5. What is diversity on Second Life?
6. What is disability on Second Life?
7. To what extent are you disabled or not on Second Life? Why?
8. Compare and contrast diversity and disability in Second Life to diversity and disability in the physical world.

Student analysis

• The disabling factors on Second Life have nothing to do with bodies, but rather are a function of the hardware environment
• One can reinvent oneself in Second Life
• Anonymity was comforting
• The virtual medium eliminates embodied stereotypes that interfere with exchange of diversity of ideas
• The environment is simultaneously global and local- Stereotypes and discrimination still occur but are not linked to bodies and backgrounds

Avatar exemplars

Examples of Avatars designed in Second Life by students and instructors to represent them in the environment.

Post-cards from Second Life

Pictures of avatars interacting in the Second Life environment.

References

Benn Michaels, W. ( 2006) The trouble with diversity. New York, NY: MacMillan.

Bowker, J.C. (2005) Memory practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

DePoy, E. & Gilson S. (2008). Healing the disjuncture: Social work disability practice. In K. M. Sowers & C. N. Dulmus (Series Editors) & B. W. White (Vol. Ed.), Comprehensive Handbook of Social Work and Social Welfare: Vol. 1. The Profession of Social Work. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

DePoy, E. & Gilson S. (2007) The human experience: Description, explanation, and judgment. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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