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Book
Branding and Designing Disability: Reconceptualising Disability Studies
(2014)
  • Elizabeth DePoy, University of Maine
  • Stephen Gilson, University of Maine - Main
Abstract
Because design is ubiquitous in popular culture, economics and politics, design theory and practice have been increasingly criticized and analyzed in multiple domains including conceptualizing, planning, creating, and branding ideas, products, spaces, geographies, practices, and concrete entities. However, despite the apprehension by social marketers of design and branding to promote socially responsible behavior change, we have not yet come to discuss and thus understand the power of design and branding in fashioning diversity categories, their worth, their membership, and their influence on individual and group identity, leaving a huge gap in intellectual development and guidance to prompt global social change through contemporary design and branding mechanisms. In this book, we argue, and illustrate through a detailed application to and analysis of health and health disparities, that design and branding are tacit yet powerful influences on the creation, reification, and perpetuation of contemporary health inequality of diversity categories, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation and disability. We illustrate how design and its byproducts in advanced capitalist global, national and local environments are significant social and economic influences on diversity delineation, internalized and assigned identity of category members, social status, and comparative health of members of diverse groups. Given this understanding, design can be used sub rosa as subversive or can be harnessed to provoke symmetry, inclusivity, and socially just health reform.
Publication Date
2014
Editor
Branding and Designing Disability: Reconceptualising Disability Studies
Publisher
Branding and Designing Disability: Reconceptualising Disability Studies
Citation Information
Elizabeth DePoy and Stephen Gilson. Branding and Designing Disability: Reconceptualising Disability Studies. London, UK(2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/elizabeth_depoy/3/