Societal Change: Towards a More Comprehensive Re-structuring of Hearing Services

Chapter 1 provided insightful documentation into the social position of people with hearing disability. It brought forward the issue that people who experience hearing disability are significantly disadvantaged and marginalised in our society. In Chapter 1 we also saw that a core element of this marginality is socially constructed and stems from unexamined historical notions of disability wherein difference, associated as it was with notions of a threat to civil order, was something to be feared and consequently stigmatised. Similarly, through a socio-historical lens we saw how people with disability were marginalised in employment as a result of 19th century processes of institutionalisation. These processes left people with disability segregated from society and left to work in sheltered employment. It was also evident that with the birth of neo-liberalism, the ideological position emerged that good citizens were those who were socioeconomically self-sufficient. In the ensuing 100 years such values were deeply written into the taken-for-granted, doxic nature (Bourdieu 1990) of everyday society. The design of disability services fell within the contradiction that these competing approaches to social participation set up.