The rhetoric of Swedish disability organisations

As discriminated groups increase their space to act in public, research is increasingly interested in how their rhetoric develops in language, argumentation and goal-setting, which is an urgent issue, not least from a social sustainability perspective. This project is based on the disability movement, where some groups have had a hard time taking a discursive space in the public eye, whereas others have a long tradition of identifying themselves as carriers of culture. The project takes on different ways of highlighting aspects of disability and the goals that have developed in the disability policy struggle. Postmodern critique of norms and more traditional approaches to discrimination are examined with respect to argumentation and recontextualization of ideas but also the linguistic change that they have led to. These changes are studied within different media, contexts and interviews. Choices regarding naming, defining and describing oneself are in several ways a function of the agent associated with the various disabilities as well as with the doxa that is both followed and challenged when representatives of groups present themselves. There is a clear tension between perspectives from within the disability movement and their members, and from the outside, which is significant because people with disabilities have not always been treated as rhetorically credible.