Online communities, created and sustained by people sharing and discussing texts on the internet, play an increasingly important role in social health movements. In this essay, we explore a collective mobilization in miniature through an in-depth analysis of two satiric texts from an online community for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). By blending a sociological analysis with a rhetorical exploration of these texts, our aim is to grasp the discursive generation of a social movement online community set up by sufferers (...) themselves to negotiate and contest the dominating biomedical perception of their condition. (shrink)

In disability studies, social and medical explanatory models are seen as being conflicting or mutually exclusive, and as mystifying respectively bodily impairment and the agency of social and environmental factors. This article uses critical discourse analysis to discuss the relationship between such models in policy documents produced by The Norwegian Federation of Organizations of Disabled People. Analysis of key topoi in the policy documents shows that they display elements of both social and medical discourse, and that the consequences of medically (...) defined impairments are used as justifications for policy interventions in a framework of social justice. While a strict version of the social model is adopted in general programmatic documents, arguments about specific policy fields conceptualize disability as a property of individuals — traditionally, a medical model framing. Analysis of topoi is shown to be a useful tool when CDA is applied to policy texts. (shrink)