Bringing Our Bodies and Ourselves Back in: Seeing Irving Kenneth Zola’s Legacy
Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it
ISBN: 978-1-78635-478-5, eISBN: 978-1-78635-477-8
Publication date: 17 December 2016
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review the legacy of sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola in bringing the body into social science research and making visible and dismantling social structured barriers to hearing and speaking and living as fully human.
Methodology/approach
It begins with an examination of Zola’s experience of “being sexy” in his book, Missing Pieces (1982). It considers what a visual sociological focus on “being sexy” can contribute to understanding structured barriers to living as fully human after the emergence of this field in the 1990s and 2000s.
Research implications
It provides two examples of the use of video cameras in understanding the daily experiences of adults using wheelchairs and children with asthma that continue the embodied work begun by Zola.
Social implications
Embodied sociological research can be a strategy for social and political change.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgment
Sections of this paper draw extensively from Bell (2010, 2013). I am grateful to the Disability and Medical Sociology sections of the American Sociological Association for sponsoring a special session on the legacy of Irving Kenneth Zola at the 2015 ASA Annual Meeting, Chicago IL, where a version of this paper was presented.
Citation
Bell, S.E. (2016), "Bringing Our Bodies and Ourselves Back in: Seeing Irving Kenneth Zola’s Legacy", Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 143-158. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720160000009008
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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