Geographies, mobilities and politics for disabled people: power-assisted device practice

ABSTRACT

In this paper, key findings are presented from an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project that investigated the geographies, mobilities and politics for disabled people who roll powered assisted devices (wheelchairs and mobility scooters). We offer a spatial framework to think about the politics of exclusion/inclusion from public space along three dimensions: as a distributed institutional decision-making process, as personal, and as an event/journey. We recruited 68 disabled people to collaborate in a multi-stage, mixed-method qualitative project from 2020–2022. Four themes emerged from our thematic analysis of everyday power-assisted device practices that offer insights to what enables or constrains access to public space: the desire for social connections and independence, normative assumptions of standing design, the built form when going places (steps, gutters and stairs) alongside the interdependencies of various care and transport networks. We point to the implications for policy, planning and future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographies
• mobilities
• disability
• politics
• mobility devices
• accessibility

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the support from Linkage Partner Assistive Technology Services Australia (ATSA).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Movement is conceived as pivotal to the making, remaking and unmaking of self and place. We employ the term ‘roll’ to indicate the movement of assistive wheeled devices described by participants – although they are variously referred to as rolling, wheeling and driving. That said, we note the differentiated experience of rolling by manual wheelchairs, power assisted wheelchairs and mobility scooters.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant LP180100913.

Notes on contributors

Theresa Harada

Theresa Harada is an Associate Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong.

Gordon Waitt

Gordon Waitt is a Senior Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong.