Ravi Malhotra, Morgan Rowe. Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own. Hoboken: Routledge, 2013. 245 pp.

Reviewed by Patrick McDonagh (Concordia University)
Published on H-Disability (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

Narrating Lives and Claiming Disability Rights

Ravi Malhotra is a professor of law, specializing in disability rights, at the University of Ottawa; Morgan Rowe is an Ottawa-based lawyer with an interest in disability issues. Together they have written Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narrative: Finding a Voice of Their Own, which aims to “contribute to a better understanding [of] the relationship between disability rights, law, and narratives” (p. 20). Using the social model of disability as articulated by Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes,[1] their work explores the recursive relationship between identity and disability rights when those rights are enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (created in 1982) and defined by Canada’s provincial and federal courts, rather than by the American model, represented by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990). In this they build on and refer back to the groundbreaking work of David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger, whose study of the life stories of Americans with disabilities after the ADA led to several articles in the 1990s and was summarized in Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities (2003). This earlier work serves as a touchstone for Malhotra and Rowe; Engel and Munger even provide the foreword for this book.

However, there are some important distinctions between the work of Engel and Munger and that of Malhotra and Rowe. In the foreground is, of course, the differing legal context. In the Canadian context, general equality rights are enshrined in a charter, leading to a “gradual recognition of disability rights in general anti-discrimination legislation such as the Charter and provincial human rights codes” (p. 33). The other distinction is that, while Engel and Munger’s study of narrative included sixty individuals over several years, Malhotra and Rowe are restricted, due to limited funding, to interviews over two years with twelve subjects with physical disabilities; all of their participants were university students in what the authors identify only as a “large Canadian city” (p. 33), and, consequently, most of their participants are also under twenty-four, although three of the twelve are mature students, the oldest being fifty-seven. The study struck a gender balance of seven women and five men.

Malhotra and Rowe have divided their book into seven chapters. The first provides a broad overview of disability studies, beginning with a general introduction to the social model of disability and its constraints (notably, according to Malhotra and Rowe, a limited consideration of lived experience). They then consider more fully the use of narrative in understanding the lives of disabled people and developing a critical analysis of the role played by disability in identity formation. The second chapter explains the methodology employed in the study, emphasizing the significance of grounded theory, a qualitative research methodology well established in sociology, in conjunction with narrative and narrative analysis that involves the study’s authors as well as its participants. The authors identify three contexts in which participants describe facing barriers—in education, employment, and transportation—and these areas provide the focus of chapters 3, 4 and 5. Chapter 6 explores issues around gendered expectations, body image, and disability, while chapter 7, “Toward an Inclusive Society,” proposes approaches to addressing the barriers and issues discussed in the previous four chapters.

The real value of this book lies in its representation of the complex and productive interplay between identity, advocacy, and disability rights, and the most enlightening portions are those when we hear the voices of the participants themselves, and even their later commentary on their observations. Many of the observations on barriers (inaccessible classrooms, inhospitable workplaces, difficult transit options) do not really present new information to readers. However, the speakers’ description of their concerns are compelling. Consider Tracy (a pseudonym) describing her conflict with a teacher who refused to wear a device that would aid her hearing: “He wouldn’t wear this. He refused to wear it. It took a month and a half of me chasing him around and finally sitting there and saying, ‘Look, under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, this is an accommodation under the law.’ I had to read him the riot act on it. And still he tries to screw around with it. I got told by someone in my division, ‘Don’t you dare take this to the [accommodations coordinator]. It will be very bad for you at the College.’ How do I protect myself from something like that?” (pp. 86-87). Malhotra and Rowe extrapolate Tracy’s narrative—“Tracy’s experiences with reluctant or oblivious instructors are extreme but not unusual, and her frustration at having to constantly resort to threats of legal action are even more common,” they write (p. 87)—and they conclude that in the university context, as in many others, advocacy is a double-edged sword that may get one the necessary accommodations, but may also “earn retributive action from an instructor or the institution generally” (p. 88).

However, while the narratives, and those sections of the book focusing on them, may be compelling, in other respects the authors’ writing does not make for fluid reading, even when the concepts themselves are not terribly inaccessible. For example, Malhotra and Rowe write of “a trichotomy of ways in which scholarly research in law may use narratives” (p. 8) when they could write “three ways,” and this tendency can become wearing.

As noted above, the study’s sample size is considerably smaller than Engel and Munger’s, and indeed is insufficient to provide any emphatic statements on the distinctions between how disabled people in Canada see themselves, as opposed to those in the United States; nor is that the goal Malhotra and Rowe set for themselves. But the study succeeds in asserting the significance of the legal structures and the role of advocacy in helping to shape identity in the narratives of the study’s participants. The book also provides a useful overview of the evolving treatment of disability in Canadian law. As a result of these virtues, it is a useful addition to the libraries of those interested in disability law as well as the sociology of disability and the formation of a “disability identity.”

Its focus is a bit deceptive however: the authors speak of a broad Canadian context, but provincial courts also shape disability policies in their regions, and while the authors never overtly name the province or the city in which their subjects live, it is clearly Ontario, and the city is likely to be Toronto or Ottawa (where both authors live and work). A more explicit contextualization of Ontario’s disability law in a larger Canadian rights environment would have been useful. This would enable the reader to assess whether or not the writers are truly representing a “Canadian” legal context or a more regional one (one that does, of course, take its cue from the federal Charter).

A further criticism of the book is that it might have functioned better as a long article or series of articles. It seems to me that the material presented would be more accessible to a broader range of readers if published in that format. Indeed, this is another distinction between this work and that of Engel and Munger. While the latter published a series of articles that later informed their 2003 book, this book is preceded by no articles on this topic. It went “straight to book,” as it were.

Note

[1]. Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes, The New Politics of Disablement (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012). It is an updated version of Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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Citation: Patrick McDonagh. Review of Malhotra, Ravi; Rowe, Morgan, Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. February, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42075

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