Institutional Discourses and Ascribed Disability Identities.

In the present study we asked: how do institutional discourses, as represented in mass media such as newspapers, confer identities upon a traditionally marginalized collective such as those with a disability? To answer our question, we examined Indian newspaper discourse from 2001 to 2010, a period which represents the temporal space in between two census counts. We observed that disability identities - that of a welfare recipient, a collective with human rights, a collective that is vulnerable, and that engages in miscreancy - were ascribed through selective highlighting of certain aspects of the collective, thereby socially positioning the collective, and through the associated signaling of institutional subject positions. Present observations indicate that identities of a collective can be governed by institutional discourse, that those 'labeled' can themselves reinforce institutionally ascribed identities, and that as institutional discourses confer identities onto the marginalized, they simultaneously also signal who the relatively more powerful institutional actors are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]