Het verschil met mijn broer Jan

Abstract

Abstract Disability is mainly approached from a clinical perspective which emphasizes the physical or mental impairements and the care disabled people need in order to survive. Very little is known about how disabled people experience the world and create meaning in their interactions with their environment. By analyzing the behaviour and interaction of my disabled brother Jan, I try to answer the following questions: (1) How does he experience the world, is he capable of meaningfull interaction and what does this tells us about human sociality? (2) Are the human sciences capable to elucidate these experiences which are unaccessible through conventional language? By using a phenomenological approach we will argue that Jan’s interaction with the world is meaningful in a way that it challenges our assumptions about how we perceive the concept of ‘sociality’. Further, we aim to show how a phenomenological way of analyzing is able to gain considerable insight in those experiences which are unaccessible through conventional language.