When Moriah Morris created a virtual persona — an avatar — in Second Life, everything seemed awkward.
Morris, or her avatar Katherine Sahara, found it difficult to get around. With the four arrow keys, plus a few other commands on her computer keyboard, she had to learn to walk, run, turn and touch objects or other people. She says she moved slowly, awkwardly, as she explored the new virtual world.
“I almost felt when I first went there that I had a disability,” says the University of Maine senior social work major from Presque Isle. “I didn’t know how to get from place to place. I didn’t know how to change my clothes. I had to figure it all out.”
That was just the point of the 14-week disability studies class exercise, according to Elizabeth DePoy, a UMaine professor of interdisciplinary disability studies with the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies. DePoy, who is co-teaching the class with professor Stephen Gilson, also a professor of interdisciplinary disability studies, found that Second Life allowed students to experience a world bereft of prejudice and judgment related to appearance and bodies — a world in which everyone starts out somewhat clumsily, but on a level playing field.
“You can’t go to Second Life and not feel like a fish out of water, similar to a person who’s being stared at in the physical environment because of appearance,” DePoy says. “You’re stared at because you don’t walk the way people normally do. In Second Life, all of that disappears.”
Everyone starts out as a newbie, she says.
At the University of Maine, some professors are using the Second Life experience to help students gain insight into communication, social interaction or other skills we sometimes take for granted. And like other faculty members who ask their students to create Second Life avatars, DePoy says the experience is instructional.
“I’m not in love with virtual games, but this is so purposeful,” she says. “In Second Life you can have relationships, you can travel the world, you can speak all kinds of languages. That’s one of the things you begin to think about (in disability studies). Am I disabled by my language if people can’t speak to me?”
DePoy says one of the lessons in disability studies includes uncoupling diversity from the concept of appearance and the physical body.
“What is diversity?” she asks. In what she and Gilson refer to as “bodies and backgrounds models of diversity,” DePoy says traditional definitions include gender and race, “but nothing about ‘Do you have different ideas?’”
In the virtual world of Second Life, where bodies and backgrounds are irrelevant, and can be created, changed and unrelated to one’s actual living experience, diversity is based more on ideas, not bodies.
In our natural societies, DePoy says, what becomes normal is what is most typical and accepted as normal by the majority. That definition allows room for judgment, prejudice and discrimination on the basis of bodies and backgrounds.
“While we use it as a teaching tool, Second Life is giving us a chance to see how the virtual environment is helping us change our embodied notions,” DePoy says. “Students are challenged by not being comfortable. They acquire a disability on the basis of being uncomfortable and not knowing how to function.”
The disability “shifts from pathology in your body to a concept of ill fit,” she says.
That concept is important for students who want a deeper understanding of diversity and disability.
Morris, whose academic concentration is in disability studies, says the Second Life experience brought the message home. Second Life, she found, was a refreshing, nonrestrictive environment.
“You could wear funky clothes. You could have purple hair. It’s kind of a judgment-free zone,” she says.
