Disability at the Intersections of Communication Ethics and Media Technologies
Meryl Alper · 2024
Disability, as a natural form of human difference, raises profound and pressing questions that are central to philosophical inquiries into ethics, respect, and morality. This chapter discusses how disability cuts across three key areas of communication ethics scholarship—power, relation, and integrity—highlighting connections between them that point toward new research and pedagogical pathways in communication ethics, as well as reveal ableist presuppositions undergirding the field of communication. After providing a summary of overlaps and divergences between disability studies and communication ethics, the chapter focuses on one subset of the communication field—that of media and technology studies—and the dynamic role of power, relation, and integrity therein with respect to disability and disabled people. Embracing ethical approaches to disability in media, technoculture, and society requires recognition of and respect for the various modes through which one might hear, listen, and communicate, especially those whose minds, bodies, and their entanglement are rarely accommodated by the built environment or accepted by society writ large.