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Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms' increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists' performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees' various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees' strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning how to perform an identity in social media is a complex, two-stage process: lifelong environmental learning through socialization and acculturation mediated by selfcomparison to others, and the transformation of this learned information into personal knowledge about how to develop one's identity online. However, disability performance complicates this learning process through oppressive able-bodied medicalization, especially of concealable communicative disabilities. Based on 31 in-depth interviews with autistics, stutterers, and hard-of-hearing users, and 7 social media documentation diaries, this article provides a comprehensive perspective that presents dis/ability performances as a product of powerful learning aspects that involve both disability-related and "ablebodied" dimensions of learning. Although individuals learn how to deal with social media violence regardless of their disabilities, social, cultural, and technical learning of how to be a disabled person in the world dramatically influences dis/ability performances and perpetuates the complexity of performing a disabled self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the communicative, cultural, and practical aspects of being a hard-of-hearing (HH) researcher who studies D/deaf people's smartphone use through 20 in-depth interviews. This context presents the conflict between seeing deafness as a disability and seeing Deaf people as members of a cultural minority. This complexity of 'subaltern-researcher' concept combines with the limitations caused by conducting research as a marginal member of the academy, which in turn prompts the researcher's conflict between the commitment to marginalized research participants and the able-bodied academic obligation to act according to able-bodied research, analysis, and standards for publication of findings. This paper suggests a reflexive description of identity, culture, senses, and communication, which interacts with the social responsibility of the disabled researcher, and the interviewees' expressed agency. As such, this article contributes methodological and communicative insights on inclusive qualitative methods regarding both disabled participants and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increased technical accessibility of social media, disabled users' attempts to be socially included are still understudied. These users' agency-based choices are impacted by constant able-bodied surveillance and disciplining, especially when it comes to dis/ability visibility and potential context collapse. This paper develops the concept of disability performance within social media studies, presenting a qualitative study of social media users with concealable communicative disabilities: autistics, hard-of-hearing and people who stutter. Four factors were found to shape users' dis/ability performances: the use of social media interfaces for the compartmentalization of disabled identity; users' continuous efforts to make their social environment inclusionary; the centrality of users' disabled identity and intersectionality; and the design of the performance's message. Together, these show disability performances to be deliberate expressions of agency on the part of vulnerable social media users, who perform dis/ability according to their own evaluation of authenticity to increase their social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how smartphone usage among deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) people is shaped by "normative" communication values, and how smartphones, despite seeming accessible, can reproduce hegemonic communicative norms. Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Israel shows that social norms of voice calls impact other smartphone interactions, such that people who cannot perform voice calls are required to obey vocal norms of immediacy even while interacting accessibly through text-based instant messaging (IM) apps or video calls. Drawing on critical disability studies, we show how deaf and HoH smartphone users' communicative practices vary according to the intersections of their audiological status with other stigmatized positions, which has profound implications for our understanding of media accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic neoliberal ableism has considerable negative implications for all disabled academics, but specifically for the marginalization, liminality, and weakness of disabled graduate students. This is particularly true for the understudied and underrepresented disabled graduate students who are not native English speakers and who live in regions that are geographically and culturally distant from the English-speaking academic hegemony. This article addresses this gap by presenting a collaborative autoethnography of two disabled Israeli doctoral students. The analysis raised two themes. The first includes the complex aspects of learning to perform new academic roles – teachers, conference presenters and researchers – as disabled academics. The second includes our marginality in two contexts, namely our studied disciplines, which fail to see disability as a critical object, and the developing Israeli community of disability studies in which disabled scholars are underrepresented. On the basis of these themes, we identify four combined environments that mirror the intersection between global neoliberal ableism and the specific ableist culture found in Israel, which exacerbate our weakness, marginality, and liminality: The Israeli disability studies community, our discipline, the Israeli academy, and the English-speaking academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]