My son was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy at three years old. As I learn what it means to be a mother of a child with a disability, I find myself frustrated at the lack of access to care, confused by the various opinions and upset at a world that is not as I wish it was. It has been a complex journey for my son, as he understands what it means to have cerebral palsy and to live with a body that works differently. Emotionally I see he is challenged and frustrated when he isn’t as fast as other children, or has to miss school for therapies. We are only at the beginning of a lifelong journey, but I want to use all my energy and skills to make the world better for children like him. I want to research the rhetoric of disability to examine how virtual reality and affective technology are used to help children with disabilities improve their physical motor functions and emotional skills. I want to focus my dissertation project on looking at electracy and Khôra as a guide to creating technology for people with disabilities that empowers active learning and improved health. The research I will conduct will look into the experience and rhetoric of cerebral palsy to see how neurological conditions affect individuals' sense of identity and agency. I want to discover ways to help children with disabilities understand themselves and their bodies, improve motor functions through assistive technology, and understand identity, and celebrate the different perspectives and unique experiences they have. My son is only seven years old and is still making sense of what it means to have a disability; this is an ongoing process that evolves in its complexity as the experiences change. I want to help work with medical researchers to advance technology that makes physical therapy accessible through VR and other technological tools for children and families so that every child can have access to the best tools to further their physical and emotional health. Virtual tools can be used to create communities for families and children with disabilities.
I am interested in the way children come to understand their sense of agency with temporal and spatial narratives that redefine and blur self/other. Focusing on inter-subjective shared identities and experiences as starting points to create ethical frameworks that work with emerging technology can enhance emotional and physical health for children. When people find themselves limited within physical spaces, time is linked to the experiences they have. Attention to spatial and temporal dynamics of identity construction in disability is critical to further dialogues surrounding liberatory critical pedagogies. How can we harness emergent technologies to create new rhetorics and pedagogies which encourage ethical action while acknowledging the critical role of identity production as part of our knowledge-making processes? I want to explore the concept of Khôra related to intersubjectivity and the possibilities of digital rhetoric to open up new ways of knowing and doing ethically. I am interested in where popular media and identity intersects, particularly related to conceptions of risk, time, and space. Time and space in Marvel's Cinematic Universe are of interest in the popular deployment of technological and scientific ideologies. Looking at how popular media is influenced and influences the rhetoric of Covid and how children are affected by the logic of probability and risk as an ever invasive fear-based discourse in their daily lives. Superheroes and other forms of popular media create and are created within the context of normative discourses surrounding ableism. I want to find ways of using superheroes to focus on the power of difference and as a way of engaging young children in education and therapy programs. How can children and parents of children with disabilities work with risk, or understand risk from their own unique experience in a way that embraces agency and positive growth? Rhetoric can provide a uniquely valuable perspective to the medical, social, and emotional well-being of children with disabilities and their families Links to articles that I have found interesting and helpful in my own journey as a parent and a scholar. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/pages/index.html https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrsq20/50/3?nav=tocList https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6693/5705 https://reflectionsjournal.net/category/archive/14-1/ https://disabilityintersections.wordpress.com/bibliography/ https://dsq-sds.org https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/456
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December 2024
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