Exploring Methodological Challenges of Researching Disability and Social Media in South Africa

In South Africa, profound inequalities along race, gender, socio-economic status etc. inherited from the colonial and apartheid past are reproduced online. Because of its intersectional character, multi-faceted nature and intimate intertwining with other socio-cultural aspects, disability represents an interesting dimension to explore such inequalities. Consistent with current theoretical understandings, disability is conceptualised as a discursive construct with a focus on the emic perspective, voice and experience. The present paper seeks to investigate the specific methodological challenges associated with researching platforms and social media (self)representations by people with disabilities in a multi-cultural, post-colonial and profoundly unequal context. The process of identifying and analysing selected social media platforms search results (e.g., Youtube, Instagram, Twitter) highlighted several issues. First of all, social media users with disabilities tend to be part of a relative elite that has internalised Western attitudes and worldviews, shaping their own conceptions of disability. A second problem concerns the difficulty in determining the geolocation of a social media text. A third problem concerns hashtags and keywords as vectors of content discovery and searchability, reproducing a vicious cycle of absence of people with disabilities in the public sphere.