Disability and employability

Abstract

When disabled people seek accommodation and inclusion, including within the framework of modern human rights discourse, a complex interaction ensues. While negotiations over accommodation may be explicit and formalized, they may also take the form of a more subtle, even implicit, dialogue that indexes psychological and moral attributes. Being an “includable” disabled person means living up to a set of often tacit role expectations, which are present in discourse and shape recruitment processes. Normative representations of “includable” disabled people – i.e., people who are represented as being, potentially, valued members of society – carry considerable force. This paper takes as its topic one corpus of such representations, drawn from a social media campaign launched by the Norwegian Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. We ask the question of what norms and values the campaign presupposes and conveys, concluding with the analytical modes of rhetoric and critical discourse analysis. Focusing on the interaction between narrative content and reader expectations, we suggest that the campaign’s normative stance is that of neoliberal inclusionism, an ethos in which disabled people are valued and provided with accommodations chiefly to the extent to which they are able to act as productive employees – ideally on a par with non-disabled people.