Disability and Sports Blog

               In my opinion, I do think that adaptive technology should be allowed in sports. I believe that one of the biggest parts of sports as a whole is being a part of a community or team. Creating an environment of inclusivity would involve every kind of athlete to participate. If athletes needs to have adaptive technology in order to participate in a sport, they should be able to participate in that sport.  Adaptive technology allows for an increase of participation for athletes with a disability. There are already multiple different categories for the Paralympic athletes in order to create fair competition depending on the type of disability the athlete may have. Check out the different category classifications here: https://www.paralympic.org/athletics/classification Therefore, I believe they could create other categories to create ways to avoid having unfair competitions. However allowing adaptive technology would require e...

This past week was the first time since the start of this semester that I had ever seen a Paralympic post on social media. Before learning about the Paralympics in this class, I had never even heard the word before.   For me, it was an exciting moment to finally see people in the disabled community being represented on social media. It was almost as exciting as the time my sister was featured on the Nasdaq screen in Times Square. Having these two experiences and now the prompt of media issues with disabled sports made me realize that there should be an increase in media coverage for the Paralympics as well as other disabled sports, but this raises the question: How?  Media coverage for people with disabilities in general has been rather small. In the white paper published by the Fords Foundation “Road Map for Inclusion: Changing the Face of Disability in Media,” there was one particular quote that stuck out to me. Judith Huemann writes,  “It is no longer acceptable to n...