Becoming Digital Citizens: Disability, Icts, and Citizenship in Contemporary China

Becoming Digital Citizens explores the relationship between disability, citizenship, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the Chinese context. Based on rich empirical evidence, this book examines the citizenship status of disabled people in a rapidly changing, digital China and the ICTs-related, multi-dimensional practices of disabled people in claiming rights and appealing for a better social position. It explores the process by which disabled people become individual and collective subjects with agency through their use of ICTs, the forms and patterns of their acts in the digital sphere, and their interactions with wider structures and existing citizenship discourse and institutions. From this, Yuanyuan Qu identifies a distinct digital disability citizenship that has its own specific features and scenarios.

The culmination of ten years of research, Becoming Digital Citizens uses a grounded theory approach and a combination of methods, including digital ethnography, content analysis, and in-depth interviews, to present a nuanced portrayal of the digital life of Chinese disabled people. In doing so, it offers new insights into the norms and practices of digital, Chinese, and disabled citizenship that widen the scope of disability and citizenship studies.

By focusing on China, a newcomer to digitalization but a fast-developing one, and the perspective of disabled people, Qu highlights the potential and challenges of using ICTs to improve inclusion and promote social justice.

Yuanyuan Qu is Lecturer in the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Glasgow, where she studied disability and internet use in China. Qu then worked as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Development at London School of Economics and Political Science. Qu’s research interests lie in the areas of the sociology of technology, social welfare and disability, and civil society, with a particular focus on China.