The Department of Disability Studies, within the Faculty for Social Wellbeing, is organising a public lecture on Thursday 7 April. The lecture, entitled 'Athletes with disabilities' or 'disabled people making sport' will be held between 18:00 and 20:00 in Hall B2, M.A. Vassalli Conference Centre - Gateway Building (GWB2). The speaker is Prof. Frédéric Reichhart.
Abstract
The Paralympic Games such as we know them today remain the result and the inheritance of a loaded history because they bring together not only the history of sport and sports practices, but also the evolution of the treatment and the representation of people with disabilities. It is with this last aspect that we site our approach in this lecture which views the Paralympic Games as a shop window, a prism through which the relationship that society maintains with people with disability reveals itself. Drawing from the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games, we examine the spectators who watch the games and check their motivations. We describe the public’s perception and propose a taxonomy in order to explain the function, the representation and the use of the games through the eyes of the stroller, primary and secondary school pupils, athletes’ friends and close relations rather than spectators coming specially to admire and contemplate the sport events.
The Paralympic Games such as we know them today remain the result and the inheritance of a loaded history because they bring together not only the history of sport and sports practices, but also the evolution of the treatment and the representation of people with disabilities. It is with this last aspect that we site our approach in this lecture which views the Paralympic Games as a shop window, a prism through which the relationship that society maintains with people with disability reveals itself. Drawing from the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games, we examine the spectators who watch the games and check their motivations. We describe the public’s perception and propose a taxonomy in order to explain the function, the representation and the use of the games through the eyes of the stroller, primary and secondary school pupils, athletes’ friends and close relations rather than spectators coming specially to admire and contemplate the sport events.
Frédéric Reichhart is Associate Professor of Sociology. He works at the National Higher Education Institute for Research for special needs, a university dedicated to disability and accessibility. He heads a Master’s degree program focused on accessibility and he is involved in research which analyzes access to tourism, sport and culture in comparative perspectives.
