Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Marie Sépulchre

Mediatic representation of disability discrimination

- A comparison between Sweden and the United States

The article this seminar is based on problematizes the historical development and current social understanding of the legal prohibition of disability discrimination in two different contexts: Sweden and the United States. For this purpose, a content analysis of newspaper articles (n=754) was performed. The analysis indicates that the right to non-discrimination based on disability is depicted as a new right that remains to be tested in Sweden and as a well-established law connected to the general history of civil rights in the United States. Differences were also found with respect to the interpretation of the protected category of “disability” and the types of discrimination cases covered in the newspapers, suggesting that the right to non-discrimination based on disability tends to be interpreted as a specific legal protection for persons with disabilities in Sweden but as a protection against discrimination that could potentially benefit anyone in the United States. Finally, the analysis found that, rather than fuelling a backlash against disability rights by pointing at costs and cases of fraud, the newspaper articles analysed in this study mostly inform about the relevance and implications of disability rights in Swedish and American society.

This seminar is hosted online. Follow this link at the time of the seminar to attend via Zoom.

Marie Sépulchre is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at Lund University and a visiting researcher at the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo in the United States. Her research centres on disability, citizenship, activism, social inequality, social justice and the right to non-discrimination. Her current research project explores how the notion of disability discrimination is understood in two different contexts - Sweden and the United States - with a focus on the sector of higher education.