Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 119, February 2021, Pages 133-142
Geoforum

People with intellectual disability and the digitization of services

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.12.022Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Digital technologies risk of exclusion for people with intellectual disability.

  • Digital skills are embedded in places, routines and familiar devices.

  • Disability support must take digital access needs into account to prevent exclusion.

  • Clarity is needed about responsibility of mainstream and disability support staff.

Abstract

As digital technologies have become ubiquitious in contemporary urban environments, geographers should recognize the co-constitutive role of such technologies in the production of space and highlight the unequal impacts of technologies, infrastructure and code on people’s lives. Building on recent developments in digital geography and inequality, this paper highlights highly uneven processes of attunement with technology. Drawing on interviews with people with intellectual disability and urban services staff in Melbourne, Australia, this paper demonstrates that while creating new opportunities for some people with intellectual disability, digitization of services has also produced new barriers to their inclusion in urban spaces. By focusing on three sets of service digitization – electronic payment systems, public transport e-ticketing and public library digitization – we show that the succesfull engagement of people with intellectual disability with digital technologies depends on the alignment of diverse components such as the person’s skills and economic resources, the availability and skills of both disability support staff and urban service staff, and favourable responses of bystanders. We argue that the multifaceted alignment that is required for the use of digitized services for people with intellectual disability creates high risk of exclusion as digital delivery is increasingly becoming the default mode for many services. Attention to moments of friction and alignment must be central in future thinking about inequality in digital geography.

Introduction

The advance of digital technologies has been accompanied by a celebratory discourse promising cities that are ‘smarter’ and consequently more sustainable, democratic and accessible (see Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015, Kitchin et al., 2016). However, recent scholarship also questions these hopeful assumptions, suggesting that smart city developments redistribute and entrench, rather than equalize, uneven access to opportunities for practising urban citizenship (Gilbert, 2010, Eubanks, 2017, Joss et al., 2017, Hatuka and Zur, 2019, Iveson and Maalsen, 2019). Studies of digital inequality emphasise the uneven classed, racialized and gendered outcomes created by the digital turn, as technologies can replicate and amplify oppressive and discriminatory structures (Macdonald and Clayton, 2013, Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015, Eubanks, 2017, Strengers et al., 2019, Elwood, 2020). Our paper contributes to this body of work by analyzing the uneven effects of urban services digitization with a specific focus on people with intellectual disability, as an extremely marginalized group of people who face a distinctive set of barriers when accessing and using digitizing services.

The exclusion of people with intellectual disability from urban citizenship has a long history. Since the 17th century, in different parts of the world, a large number of people with primarily intellectual or psychosocial disabilities have been excluded from citizenship participation through incarceration in institutions. Since the 1970s, a process of deinstitutionalisation began in some developed countries, involving the rehousing of people with disability in smaller and more dispersed housing in urban neighborhoods, with the aim of increasining their opportunities for participation in society (Wiesel and Bigby, 2015). Beyond housing, attempts have been made towards enhancing participation of people with intellectual disability in mainstream services, rather than specialist disability services, for example through individualized support (Power and Bartlett, 2018). Yet, despite deinstitutionalization, some people continue to experience a continuing lack of inclusion in aspects of society.

In Australia, the terms on which people with disabilities can seek to participate in community life have recently changes with the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The NDIS constitutes an expansive overhaul of support funding for people with disability which saw the shift from primarily block funded disability support services, to primarily individualized funding allocated to eligible people with disability. The NDIS was largely welcomed for its promises to double government spending on disability support and place more control with people with disabilities (on funding see Every Australian Counts, 2016). Adults whose primary disability was recorded as intellectual disability form almost 30 percent of NDIS participants and are thus the largest group of users (NDIS, 2019). However, not all people with intellectual disability are participants in the Scheme, for instance because their disability is considered mild, or because they have limited formal and informal advocacy support when trying to access the Scheme. Enhancing mainstream participation by people with disability is one of the key objectives of this reform (Wiesel et al., 2019) and the Scheme’s architects have expressed their faith in the power of technological advancement to enhance participation for people with disability (NDIS, n.d.).

Literature on people with intellectual disability has highlighted social interactions and practices that lead to their exclusion, and at times self-exclusion, from mainstream settings (Hall, 2004, Hall, 2010; Wiesel and Bigby, 2016). For instance, people with intellectual disability are often frowned upon in mainstream settings for being too slow, too noisy or presenting other behaviors considered inappropriate (Wiesel and Bigby, 2016). These literatures suggest that barriers to participation by people with intellectual disability are multifaceted, and involve the interaction between a cognitive impairment, and social and environmental factors, including social attitudes towards intellectual disability, and the practices of disability support services. In this paper, we bring this view to bear on the effects of services digitization on the inclusion and exclusion of people with intellectual disability.

Technological innovation is often discussed for its promised potential to overcome disabling barriers. For example, the NDIS has repeatedly emphasized its desire “to optimise the opportunities that technological advancement and digital disruption are offering society, putting people with a disability at the forefront of these opportunities” (NDIS, n.d.). However, various scholars (van Dijk, 2006, Ferri et al., 2015, Goggin, 2018; Gleeson, 1999) have argued that technologies can also have exclusionary effects for people with disabilities. We situate this paper in geographical scholarship that observes the deeply uneven social and spatial orders around which smart city politics are assembled (e.g. Iveson and Maalsen, 2019, Elwood, 2020).

The paper draws on interviews with people with intellectual disability, and managers of mainstream services in Melbourne’s North-Eastern suburbs, as well as input from a team of research advisers with intellectual disability. Our empirical analysis suggests that certain aspects of digitization can make cities easier to navigate for some people with intellectual disability who have access to technologies and the skills to use them. However, digitization can also compound forms of exclusion of people with intellectual disability. The paper shows that successful engagement with digital service systems require a multifacted alignment of circumstances such as disability supports, digital technology training and the availability of personal devices, and that these requirements create exclusions and uneven opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. We argue that the geographical study of processes of digitization must consider how exclusion emerges in interactions with digital technologies and attempt to identify the socio-spatial circumstances that are required for technologies to play an enabling role in the lives of people with intellectual disability.

The paper is structured as follows: first, we review existing literatures on digital inequality in cities; second, we review the subset of this literature that deals specifically with the impact of digital technologies on people with intellectual disability; third, we present an overview of our study methods, and relevant context for our case study area; fourth, we discuss our key findings, organized around three sets of digitizing urban services: digital payment systems in urban retail settings, electronic ticketing systems for public transport, and digital access programs in public libraries; we conclude by highlighting the implications of our paper for wider debates on digital inequality.

Section snippets

the politics and inequalities of digital technologies

Early conceptualizations of digital technology used terms such as ‘online’, ‘virtual’ and ‘cyber’, to describe the digital as a sphere that is separate from, and somehow less ‘real’, than the physical world. For example, the ‘physical’ computer was imagined as a gateway to the ‘virtual’ internet, and seminal work on digital exclusion therefore focused on ownership or other forms of access to digital devices (Gilbert, 2010). But as Sadowski and Pasquale (2015: n.p.) observe ‘it no longer makes

Method and context

This paper is informed by a case study on the accessibility of mainstream services for people with intellectual disability in Melbourne, the capital city of the State of Victoria in Australia. Material presented here was generated between October 2018 and May 2020, and some data collection thus occured while Covid-19 distancing measures were in place. The data collected comprised of two components. The first component consisted of semi-structured interviews undertaken with 10 people with

Digital technology in the lives of people with intellectual disability

People with intellectual disability who participated in the research discussed accessibility issues related to the digitization of three kinds of services: digital payment systems in retail settings, electronic ticketing on public transport, and digital resources and programs in public libraries. These settings emerged in our interviews as significant areas where people with intellectual disability interact with digital technologies in everyday urban settings in ways that create opportunities

Discussion

Urban scholars highlight the ways digital technologies can compound racial, classed and gendered discrimination and exclusion (e.g. Sadowski, 2015; Eubanks, 2017, Safransky, 2019). The empirical exploration presented here adds to this body of work by focusing on the differentiated impact of urban digitization on people with intellectual disability. Building on conceptualizations of digital technology in cities as integrated, rather than separate, to other social and physical spheres of the city

Conclusion

In conclusion, digital systems are intricately woven into urban infrastructures (Sadowski and Pasquale 2015) and this has deep running and hitherto largely overlooked consequences for people with limited digital literacy and resources, including many people with intellectual disability. People with limited access to internet connectivity and devices are at risk of missing out on numerous resources and opportunities. Access barriers to digital platforms and the opportunities these hold can

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge contributions in time and expertise by interviewees and the team of advisers: Greg, Heather, Luke and Susan. This paper was made possible by Discovery Project funding from the Australian Research Council Grant number DP180102191.

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