Background The principle investigator of this proposed study lives with congenital muscular dystrophy and uses power wheelchair to support her mobility in daily life. She has been experiencing various degree of oppression by the inaccessibility in the built environment every day since she was a child. She has to keep asking people for help or being highly vigilant to figure out wheelchair-accessible routes (if any) while she is navigating the built environment. Such continual negotiation makes her seriously frustrated and loses agency of her daily life. She hopes to enjoy a social life freely as her peers do. People usually try to comfort her by saying that she still got other choices and just go to those places that are accessible for you; and it will be fine. Sometimes people may even want to persuade her to be satisfied with the current situations as it is seemingly impossible to make the environment totally barrier-free. However, in response to the recurrent experiences of spatial oppression and other people’s lack of awareness of the significance of a barrier-free society, she aspires to examine the close connections of architectural inaccessibility and stigmatization of people with physical disabilities (PWPD). As to the general public, actually an “unfriendly” environment would also deprive them of the opportunity to appreciate the …show more content…
PWPD), but also other people associated with them (e.g. parents, caregivers) through stigma-by-association (Goffman, 1963) or affiliated stigma (i.e. self-stigma among associates) (Mak & Cheung, 2008). When PWPD perceive that the stigmatizing experiences and emotions felt by them would also be affecting their caregivers/ companions during the process of negotiating with architectural inaccessibility, they might blame themselves and intensify their psychological pain (Yoshioka & Schustack,