ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the promises of technology for disabled people. Technologies, and especially new information and communication technologies, are thought by many to hold the power to bridge and even undo disability. The chapter provides a set of tools and resources for such an inquiry, and offer analyses and discussion of the generative and transformative power of technologies in the lives of disabled people. It also focuses on recent work in disability studies as well as social studies of science and technology (STS). The chapter expresses that in the context of the Norwegian welfare state and its extensive apparatus of public services and measures, the mobilization of new technologies works in a powerful way to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. The strategy for compensating for disability within normalization also builds upon the image of agency as distributed in relations.