Date of Graduation

7-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Kayser, Casey

Committee Member

Pope, Adam

Second Committee Member

Sparks, Leigh

Keywords

Digital discourse analysis; Disability rhetoric; Disability studies; Narrative medicine; Special Books by Special Kids; YouTube

Abstract

Digital media has expanded disability advocacy and community building by enabling accessible, visual storytelling and connection. Special Books by Special Kids (SBSK), a YouTube channel using interview-based disability storytelling, foregrounds people’s experiences with disabilities in the videos, while inviting viewers to interpret, identify with, and respond in the comments. As a participatory storytelling space, SBSK offers a site for examining how disability meanings are constructed, negotiated, and transformed through narratives, multimodal practices, and audience uptake, while revealing how dominant disability rhetoric or ableist discourse that positions people with disabilities as burdens, inherently deficient, or socially devalued, can be reproduced, complicated, or resisted. To analyze SBSK videos and comments, this study pairs rhetorical/multimodal analysis with narrative medicine’s three pillars: attention, representation, and affiliation. The rhetorical/multimodal analysis examines disability through language, image, interaction, and framing, while narrative medicine clarifies how disability stories are heard, represented, and relationally taken up. This integration is significant because the three pillars shift the analysis from representation alone to the processes through which meaning-making is produced, conveyed, reconfigured, and extended across transcripts and comments. Results suggest that video participants consistently reframe disability as lived and relational experience, challenge stereotypical and deficit-based narratives, and center disabled voices and epistemic authority. They also frequently highlight accessibility as interactional practice and enable participant narrative control, while contesting normative standards of productivity, independence, and normalcy less consistently. In transcripts, dominant disability rhetoric that appears most often when disability is framed through normalcy, productivity, independence, or external assessment. The narrative medicine analysis shows that attention, representation, and affiliation function as patterns of rhetorical uptake rather than isolated events of discourse.In transcripts, attention and representation operate together, as prompts structure what is noticed and primary narrators shape how disability is represented. In comments, attention initiates response, representation anchors interpretation, and affiliation extends meaning through shared identity and relational connection. Viewed through these pillars, dominant disability rhetoric emerges when attention remains affective or aesthetic, representation is bypassed or reduced to external judgment, and affiliation becomes pity, admiration, protectiveness, or inspiration rather than shared recognition. Together, these findings show that SBSK is a dynamic digital storytelling space where disability meanings are constructed, negotiated, reproduced, and complicated across SBSK video samples and comment sections.

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