ESPAÇOS COTIDIANOS DAS PESSOAS COM DEFICIÊNCIA: CONTRIBUIÇÃO PARA UMA GEOGRAFIA DA DEFICIÊNCIA BRASILEIRA

Abstract

For a long time society has regarded disabled persons as incapable and stigmatized. Prejudice and discrimination have excluded them from being together with the others, with consequences for a direct impact on their forms of interactions and conviviality in their everyday spaces. Nowadays, disability is considered a characteristic of a personality and part of a scenario of diversity, so that disabled persons have gained the same rights and obligations as all the other citizens. Thus, also disabled persons have started to organize themselves in fighting for better opportunities in society and, consequently, for a better life quality. But even if improvements and advances can be perceived in the life of disabled persons, changes are slow and a major portion of them is still experiencing socio-spatial exclusion. This observation is the result of research in different areas of knowledge, among them geography. Studies on the subject of the so-called Geography of Disability are already common in Anglophone countries; however, similar studies are missing in the Brazilian environment. In general, these studies reveal that, still today, disabled persons do not have the same opportunities as others, for example in the fields of access to education, acceptance in the health system, work and housing. In this context, the dissertation has heard individuals with different disabilities to elaborate an epistemological base for a Brazilian Geography of Disabilitiy accepting the following challenge: In what ways do disabled persons interact with and in their everyday spaces? Based on the assumption that disabled persons are the protagonists of their own life and, as such, understand what is happening in their everyday environment, a methodology has been used that provokes their ideas through profound qualitative interviews by the demonstration of photographies (Photographic Elicitation Interviewing – PEI). The interviews are structured in four different modes of interaction: interpretation, valorization, operation, and response, as proposed by the environmental sociologist Stokols (1978). Three distinct groups of disabled persons have been analyzed: wheelchair users, blind and deaf persons. The research process fhas been centered on experiences of disabled persons in Ponta Grossa, a medium-sized Brazilian city which 100 kilometers distant from Curitiba, the capital of the South Brazilian State of Paraná. The methodological option, however, was not restricted to this place, but also involves reflections on experiences of a wider range. Therefore, the main question has been to understand the deficiencies of structures, or, to put more bluntly, to invert the hegemonic question of the “disability” of persons to better focus on the “disability” of structures. Therefore, it should be understood that only an organized approach of both the disabled person him- or herself in understanding his/her own situation as well as efforts from the wider society and the state make it possible to establish adequate spaces with inclusive characteristics.