Micro-bullying and ableism: The social status of young disabled people in public space

Abstract

This paper focuses on how disability affects the social experience in public spaces as well as on how microaggressions appear in the day to day life of young disabled people To shed some light on this, the definitions of Keller and Galgay (2010) on manifestations of microaggressions towards disabled people will be used as well as Goffman’s (1959) theories on social interaction and stability These definitions will be considered in relation to our data from the LIFE-DCY research Our findings indicate that even though we usually presume social stability in our human interactions, the social reality of disabled people is characterized by social turmoil and chaos because of the microaggressions and ableism It can therefore be argued that social turmoil and chaos are a part of the daily lives of disabled people, rather than infrequent incidental events as previous theories have indicated In this chaos, disabled people find themselves between a rock and a hard place and feel that they are responsible for re-creating social stability – but at the same time they experience outrage because of the microaggression and ableism they encounter.