ABSTRACT
Cultural contextualisation Social media have been credited with playing a major role in creating religious and political change in the Middle East (e.g. Eickelman & Anderson, 2003; Howard et al., 2011; Stepanova & Eurasia, 2011, Gerbaudo, 2012). The role that Arab people with disabilities might have played, or continue to play, in such historic, changing times merits examination. This is all the more disconcerting as research overwhelmingly looks favourably upon the role that social media (and technology in general) have played in the formation of the new identity of Arabs. Researchers studying the impact of technology on disability, however, are divided on how they conceptualise the benefi ts of technology. Mainly they either foreground what technology can do for people with disabilities (i.e. highlighting the cultural tool), thereby backgrounding the agency of the users, or they generalise the claims with no substantiation or documentation of actual usage. Research about social media (or technology in general) and Arabs with disability is almost non-existent, save my decade-long ethnographic examination of how a now 47-year-old man with quadriplegia from Oman named Yahya, the focus of this chapter, has managed to create personal and social inclusion through Yahoo chatrooms and through Microsoft PowerPoint (Al Zidjaly, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2015).
