At this point, I have also included Astrid’s Journal from Nederland and The Beauty Offensive from Britain in my corpus list, in an effort to make the study more Europe-focused. I have had great difficulty tracking down blogs written by women concerning disability/illness that are either from the UK or continental Europe. Disability carnivals and blogrols from more popular blogs link mostly to US based or Canadian bloggers. I assume that European bloggers use languages other than english and given that I could only read either English or Greek (my dutch and french are really inadequate for anything but tourism), I am scanning for greek disabled women bloggers(I have so far looked for αναπηρία, τύφλωση, σκλήρυνση κατά πλάκας).

This post then is an open call for anyone who knows of disabled-mentally ill, chronically ill, impaired-women european bloggers. Also, an invitation still for communicating through the questions I posted previously.

Thank you in advance.

1. What is blogging for you? What value does it have in your life?

2. How long have you been blogging

3. How would you say it has helped you personally

4. What other ways of Computer Mediated Communication do you use (for example personal webpage, Chat, social networks)

5. How do you value blogging over other ways of communicating through the internet?

• how different identities come together online
• whether communicating embodied experience through blogs aids understanding and diversity
• how can blogs serve as an inclusion tool

The method used will be discourse analysis and online interviews which I hope to do through this blog. I have decided to read women with impairments, disabilities, mental health problems and chronic illnesses (which all are forced into the category ‘disability’ for economy reasons). The reason for that is that even though I understand and respect the obvious differences between conditions and embodied experiences, I decided that the shared experiences are more important to me here.

‘…[T]here are many points of connection between very different people rooted in their shared experiences of biomedical inscription, pain, social isolation and political and economic marginalisation’ (Parr and Butler 1999, Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of illness, impairment and disability, Routledge: 2)

The outline and title will be submitted on the 23rd May 08.