ABSTRACT
Empirical themes in the disability and chronic illness literature in health geography prominently include issues around marginalization – in employment (Kitchin et al. 1998), in accessibility (e.g. Imrie and Wells 1993; Imrie 1996), and in daily life (Dyck 1995). Documenting responses to processes of exclusion and marginalization by persons with disabilities has been fruitful in creating a spatial understanding of disability. For example, persons with disabilities may appropriate certain place-specific exclusionary practices in order to re-define what it is to be disabled (see e.g. Dorn 1998). Also, in the production of formal and scientific knowledge – an exclusionary practice in the academy – geographers are writing about their personal experience of disability and disabling illness as a way forward to empowerment (e.g. Chouinard and Grant 1995; Chouinard 1997; Golledge 1997; Moss 1999). Accounting for the ways persons with disabilities are positioned within society has identified several of the mechanisms through which marginalization takes place (e.g. Gleeson 1999). Like other exclusionary processes, marginalization of persons with disabilities takes place in both public and private spaces at various spatial scales (see Sibley 1995; Butler and Bowlby 1997; see Parr and Philo (1995) and Radford and Park (1998) for examples in mental health). Social spaces created in and through these milieus of power are place-specific in that a singular configuration at any point in time is as unique in its configuration as it is similar to other social spaces – giving rise to the notion that the processes of marginalization are similar, but the outcomes are (or may be) different.
