Dissertation Defense for Leonor Vanik – Yours, Mine and Theirs: The Social Production of Disability Space
October 19, 2018
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
Great Cities Institute, 400 CUPPAH
Address
412 S Peoria St., Chicago, IL 60607
Cost
Free
Calendar
Download iCal FileUrban Planning and Policy doctoral candidate Leonor Vanik is defending her dissertation on Friday, October 19. The defense is open to the public.
As people with disabilities (PWD) seek to become more integrated in the community through federally mandate, the nation has also increased neoliberal policies to deinstitutionalize as a cost saving measure to State Medicaid programs. At this time, little is known about the complexity of the experience PWD have after selecting and living in communities that are affordable and accessible to them. For some able-bodied individuals the ability to access space is an afterthought. For PWD it can be exclusionary.
This dissertation explores how PWD experience and view their community’s facilitators and barriers in their everyday life and the individuals who create and shape them through changes in the social, political, and economic transitions of spatial practices. A multi-methodological approach of “grounded critical visualization” was developed incorporating modes of phenomenology, ethnography, and constructivist grounded theory with aspects of photovoice, spatial analysis, and statistics to understand the overarching question, What is the relationship between the local, everyday practices of people with disabilities living in the community and their social production of space? Henri Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” was operationalized to inform the social production of space consisting of spatial practice (lived experiences), representations of space (conceptualized space), and representational space (perception of the lived space). The built environment, policy, and uneven development framework is used to understand the influences these factors produce as a starting point for further inquiry. This is juxtaposed by dialectically inserting the medical and social models of disability as a lens to better understand accessibility in the development of a substantive theory on the social production of disability space and accessibility issues within the built environment and the social practice of everyday life over time.
Research was supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Early Doctoral Student Research Grant and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.
Date posted
Oct 15, 2018
Date updated
Oct 15, 2018