Disabled children’s childhood studies: a distinct approach?
Abstract
This paper suggests that the emergence of disabled children’s childhood studies as an area of study offers a distinct approach to inquiry; it represents a significant shift away from the long-standing deficit discourses of disabled childhoods that have dominated western culture and its reaches. On the one hand, contemporary childhood studies contest normative, Eurocentric mantras around the ‘standard child’; while on the other, disability studies critique the medical discourses and the scope of its authority. However, while drawing on these two approaches, disabled children’s childhood studies provide more than this combined critique. In disabled children’s childhood studies, disabled children are not viewed as necessarily having problems or being problems, but as having childhoods.
... Only later have scholars explicitly considered a "disabled children's childhood studies" (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2013;Curran & Liddiard, 2017). DCCS has three main aims: to move from discussion about to research with disabled children; to follow ethics and research designs that centre children; and to trouble existing normative hegemonies in research and practice (Curran andRunswick-Cole, 2014, p. 1618). I situate myself in, and build on, these ideas. ...
... Boggis's (2017a) edited collection brings together interdisciplinary work on disability and childhood. This collection focuses on legislation and policy (Ayling, 2017), the safeguarding of young disabled people (Boggis, 2017b) and SEND policy and practice (Rawlings, 2017 (2004) to describe the position that many disabled children find themselves in, and they argue that disabled children's childhood studies aim to "enable disabled children to step outside of the 'normative shadows' that so often cloud discussions of their lives" (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014, p. 1618). ...
... If some small change can come from one individual person (myself), surely many people could make many small changes. I suspect that many teachers, teaching assistants and midday assistants would see the value in such an approach, but become subject to surveillance of their own, find themselves with limited power (Perryman, Maguire, Braun & Ball, 2018 This peeling back of layers is, for me, part of DCCS's call to trouble existing normative hegemonies (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014, p. 1618. From my observations in the classroom and my data analysis above, I believe that this questioning and reflection needs to extend to all adults in the classroom. ...
This thesis explores how (dis)abled children in one inner-city English primary
school experience classroom space in an embodied way. It takes Disabled
Children’s Childhood Students (DCCS) as a starting point and applies
Deleuzoguattarian ideas such as the assemblage and becoming, to contribute
new knowledge to how classroom space disables and enables. The study took
place over a seven-month period and involved 47 children who, in a novel
approach, took part regardless of a label of special educational needs (SEN),
disability or impairment. The children shared their experiences through various
creative and visual qualitative methods, including photography, drawings and
model rooms. These, combined with observations of the whole classroom
space, were analysed thematically, paying attention to lines of flight, leading to
various significant findings. Firstly, I found that the classroom space was
saturated by the idea of vertical development: a normative expectation that
children grow physically and metaphorically upwards towards adulthood.
However, I also observed resistance from children to this idea. One original
contribution to knowledge that this study makes is seeing photography as both
a creative method and a form of resistance, as children who took part could turn
the lens back on adults. Further insights included how certain forms of
embodiment in the classroom are encouraged while others are discouraged.
These are linked to ideas of crip epistemic insight: a perspective that privileges
the experiences of disabled people’s embodied experiences of the world.
Finally, I discuss the resistance and joyful potential in “leaks” which challenge
the boundaries imposed on children’s bodies. Specifically, I contribute to the
small but growing field of toilet studies in discussing expected behaviour in and
around toilets. The thesis takes ideas from DCCS and assemblage theory and
applies them in new ways to (dis)abled children’s embodied experiences,
making valuable methodological and theoretical contributions.
... When it is child-and familycentred at the same time, family support can avoid the artificial dichotomisation of parental rights and child's best interests that is inherent to risk-oriented child protection practice (Bauer & Wiezorek, 2007). Ignoring the social and cultural context of (disabled) childhoods and treating risks and rights separately results in a hierarchisation of services as opposed to holistic family support structures (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014). Human rights based practice with disabled children is highly complex in its multi-mandate and multi-professional requirements, as well as in its normative underpinnings (Traustadóttir et al., 2015), but it is possible if services are inclusive in the sense of structurally integrating different service systems, as well as being socially and culturally sensitive to the characteristics and circumstances of children and families. ...
... Third, ableism theory (Campbell, 2009;Wolbring, 2008) provides an analytical lens to establish how CW servicesat the levels of social policy and social work practicedifferentiate between disabled and non-disabled children and thereby construct notions of abledness. Dominant accounts of normal/typical childhoods tend to ignore the social contexts that produce them, and ableism interwoven with adultism leads to the othering of disabled children (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014). By sustaining separate CW and disability systems for services to disabled children in many European states, rather than a universal low-threshold multi-professional CW system for all children and families, notions of abledness and normatised childhoods remain unchallenged. ...
All children and their families have a right to CW services that ensure their equal opportunities. However, due to structural, social, and cultural barriers, CW services are not equally accessible for all families. This is particularly true for disabled children and their families. The aim of this paper is to highlight the potentials of a European comparison of inclusive CW services to disabled children and their families. For this purpose, CW is approached from a human rights perspective, theories on childhood dis/ability and intersectionality theory. Perspectives from Austria, Iceland and Ireland are introduced, analysed through an intersectional human rights lens, and then compared. An argument is made for a European analysis of social policy (and subsequently social work practice) regarding inclusive CW services. Three insights that can be gained from such research are discussed: (1) the inclusivity of CW services for disabled children and their families, (2) the relevance of intersecting social positions of disabled children and their families for the provision and receipt of CW services, and (3) the role of CW policy and practice in constructing abledness in terms of normatised childhoods as the basis for service provision.
... Traditionally youth studies have emphasised research where the adult researcher is an outsider looking in through an adult lens, rather than actively seeking out young people's voices and experiences (Best 2007;Ibrahim 2014;Kamp and Kelly 2014). Recently research involving young people has expanded (Bailey et al. 2015;Liddiard et al. 2019a) along with the heightened awareness of young people's voices and as social actors (Curran and Runswick-Cole 2014). Assumptions regarding capacity to participate in research has been affected by this change in the acknowledgement of young people as active participants and less as subjects (Liddiard et al. 2019a;Tisdall 2017). ...
... In particular, while much research has been conducted in the Global North contexts where a discourse of children's rights and equality tends to be more present in social policies, considerably less is heard about children's lives from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Global South (Singal and Muthukrishna, 2014). These issues not only add to the misrepresentation of global childhoods to differ mainstream images of children being white, middle-class, able-bodied and heterosexual (Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014;Dyer, 2016;Kehily, 2010), but also the underrepresentation of local knowledge connected with cultural wisdom (Moore et al., 2005). ...
Kropp og berøring i institusjonell omsorg for barn og unge er eit tema med aukande internasjonal forskingsinteresse, etter å ha vore eit tabubelagt emne på bakgrunn av tidlegare overgrepshistorier. Denne artikkelen handlar om utviklingshemma barn og unge i barnebustad, ei gruppe unge som vanlegvis går «under radaren». Dei unge har behov for omfattande hjelp gjennom døgnet og får bistand av kommunalt tilsette omsorgspersonar. Omsorgssamspelet mellom kommunalt tilsette og dei unge som har sin heim i barnebustaden, blir analysert og drøfta med basis i omgrepa body work, intimate labour og emotional labour. Kroppen som offentleg objekt og privat subjekt er i tillegg viktige analytiske element. Innanfor institusjonelle rammer får dei unge sin kropp ulike roller, men kan vere prisgjeven tilsette si forståing av omsorg og institusjonelle oppgåver. English abstract Touch and Intimacy – The Body at the Intersection Between Public and Private. Care in Small Institutions for Intellectually Disabled Children Body and touch in residential care for children shows a growing interest in international research. This subject has been tabooed based in earlier stories of abuse in residential institutions. This paper addresses children with profound intellectual disability living in small institutional residences, children that normally go “under the radar.” The young ones have comprehensive needs for practical support around the hours, provided by public employed care professionals. The interaction in care activities between the employees and the children is analysed and discussed related to the concepts body work, intimate labour, and emotional labour. The dichotomy of the body as a public object and private subject is also important analytical elements. Within institutional frames is the body of the residents given different roles but can make the children dependent on the employees’ understanding of care and their institutional duties.
In this introduction, we explore the complex entanglements of children and youth with the multifaceted project of modernity in India by advancing the framework of the ‘everyday urban.’ By foregrounding the analytical categories of childhood and youth, we argue that the political, emotional, and material contexts imbricated in the urban spatio-temporal scapes of everyday experiences shape trajectories of being and becoming modern and its antitheses for young people. Casting aside the problematic binary of victim/ heroic resistance within which young people in the global South are often located, the volume nuances questions of agency by highlighting how young Indians straddle forces of global capital, popular media, local political formations, and traditional familial arrangements to participate in wider meaning-making processes. Against the backdrop of a rich and growing scholarship, we also situate the need to address inequalities of knowledge production in childhood and youth studies and stress on cross-disciplinary methods. In sum, the introduction argues that children and youth in India navigate the uneven and often violent terrain of modernity not just through ‘key moments’ but in the mundane space and routines of the everyday in households, schools, streets, slums, media outlets, and government centres, among others, all of which have deep political and social implications in India and its future.
This chapter begins with an examination of the many intersections between aspirations, discipline, and modernity within the K-12 schooling system in Delhi, with a particular focus on the frequent exclusion of disabled children from what is known as the mainstream education system. Subsequently, in place of an investigation of the ways in which disabled children’s needs are often misunderstood and unmet within mainstream schooling, the chapter turns its focus toward examining educational experiences that prioritize the voices of disabled children and their caregivers. To describe which spaces disabled children and their caregivers find to be the most conducive to their own notions of education, the chapter will draw upon ethnographic work conducted across two after-school programs in Delhi. Both programs offer inclusive extracurricular experiences—one in sports, and the other in theater and the arts—with the aim of creating environments that critically investigate normative assumptions about ability and participation. These after-school programs, as the chapter demonstrates, serve as sites of negotiation, playing a particular role wherein disability does not operate as a fixed, static identity, but rather one where questions of ability, belonging, and identity come to be negotiated on an ongoing basis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a year, this chapter examines disabled children’s experiences in after-school programs across two sites in Delhi. It will interrogate the ways in which inclusive after-school programs have come to be conceptualized as inclusive, designed as such and subsequently implemented with the aim to provide nuanced insights into how disabled children inhabit broader categories such as modernity on an ongoing basis.
Through the creation of safe spaces in which to explore and challenge dominant negative views of disabled children and young people, this co-written paper presents unique insight into the meaning and impact upon disabled young people's lives of medical lenses and deficit models of disability. Bodies of work and dominant debates in medical sociology, disability studies and childhood studies have so far largely overlooked the experiences and positioning of disabled children and young people and have rarely involved them in the development or discussion of theory. Drawing on empirical data, and through a series of creative, reflective workshops with a UK-based disabled young researchers' collective (RIP:STARS), this paper discusses areas of theoretical importance identified by the disabled young researcher collective-the validation of their lives, negotiation of their identity and acceptance in society. The implications, and possibilities, of platforming disabled children and young people's voices in theoretical debates are deliberated and are achieved through the yielding of privileged academic voice and the development of a symbiotic, genuine partnership which resonates with disabled young people and recognises them as experts in their own lives.
We approach this chapter with a number of communities in mind. Disabled people, people of color and gay, transsexual and queer people share a common history of being colonized by researchers who “have probed, recollected, appropriated and ultimately exploited their lives in insensitive and offensive ways” (Llorens, 2008. p. 3). Research is an imperialist, disablist and heteronormative peculiarity of modernist knowledge production. In 1999, Tuhiwai Smith issued a call for the decolonizing of methodologies and in this chapter we take up that call. Tuhiwai Smith demands us to think again about how research can be enacted - as a liberatory rather than oppressive venture.
This text provides a critical analysis of the social construction of childhood and children's agency. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis combining social theory, social policy and the empirical findings of social science research, it bridges the current gap between theory and practice, offering an incisive theoretical account of childhood that is grounded in substantive areas of children's lives such as health, education, crime and the family. This furthers understanding of the impact of policy on children's everyday lives and social experiences.
Disability Studies is an area of study which examines social, political, cultural, and economic factors that define 'disability' and establish personal and collective responses to difference. This insightful new text will introduce readers to the discipline of Disability Studies and enable them to engage in the lively debates within the field. By offering an accessible yet rigorous approach to Disability Studies, the authors provide a critical analysis of key current issues and consider ways in which the subject can be studied through national and international perspectives, policies, culture and history. Key debates include: • The relationship between activism and the academy • Ways to study cultural and media representations of disability • The importance of disability history and how societies can change • National and international perspectives on children, childhood and education • Political perspectives on disability and identity • The place of the body in disability theory This text offers real-world examples of topics that are important to debates and offers a much needed truly international scope on the questions at hand. It is an essential read for any individual studying, practising or with an interest in Disability Studies.
This innovative book discusses the meaning of 'inclusion' through the exploration of the interactions between disabled and non-disabled people at a community leisure centre. By exploring the nature of this interface, an understanding of how people create potential for both disability and inclusion is revealed. This book takes a very different approach to that of existing texts, which have tended to concentrate mainly on disabled people's exclusion. The advantage of this new approach is that it adds an extra dimension to our understanding of how discriminatory practice is variously perpetuated and challenged.. Constructions of Disability is valuable reading for all people who are working towards increased social inclusion for disabled people, including theorists and students of disability studies and learning difficulty, leisure management and disability service providers, and their families. Using a practical case study approach, it explores the impact that social interaction between disabled and non-disabled people can have increasing or decreasing disabled people's opportunities for inclusion. Examples of both inclusive and discriminatory practice are described in detail, and the positive and negative effects of these actions on the participants are demonstrated and discussed. This insightful book offers a wide range of practical suggestions for the future development of more inclusive theory, policy and practice.
Introduction: The formation of disability studies Disability is an enigma that we experience but do not necessarily understand. While some people are born with or experience disability as children, most of us become familiar with disability later in life. For the majority, then, what was once deemed as foreign, something outside of our bodies and experience, frequently becomes an intimate part of our lives as we age. As our parents reap the blessings of hard work and long lives, disability enters as a companion affecting their cognitive, intellectual, physical, and social functioning. In today's world, our children and their friends are more vulnerable to violence-triggered impairment, exposed to environmentally produced asthma, and diagnosed with learning disorders and hyperactivity deemed to require control by drugs. At work and in public spaces, universal design, accessible buildings, and broadened public laws have made disabled people a ubiquitous presence. World news highlights how ongoing ...
Over the last thirty years, the field of disability studies has emerged from the political activism of disabled people. In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that the social model theory has reached a dead end. Drawing on a critical realist perspective, Shakespeare promotes a pluralist, engaged and nuanced approach to disability. Key topics discussed include: dichotomies - the dangerous polarizations of medical model versus social model, impairment versus disability and disabled people versus non-disabled people, identity - the drawbacks of the disability movement's emphasis on identity politics, bioethics in disability - choices at the beginning and end of life and in the field of genetic and stem cell therapies, care and social relationships - questions of intimacy and friendship. This stimulating and accessible book challenges orthodoxies in British disability studies, promoting a new conceptualization of disability and fresh research agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in disability studies and sociology, as well as professionals, policy makers and activists.
There is a dearth of literature on the adoption of disabled children within the UK, and that which has been published is somewhat dated and often characterised by largely empiricist approach, which is perhaps surprising in view of the fact that the study of adult disability has benefited so greatly from an understanding of the social processes involved. Cousins (2009), for example, has suggested that disabled children are profoundly disadvantaged in the adoption process by the negativity associated with the social construction of disability.
Findings
This article seeks to develop a framework that provides a theoretically informed and multidimensional approach to the understanding of the adoption of disabled children. It does so by drawing on Layder's delineation of different levels of analysis. This entails examining wider macro features that influence adoption processes, right through to the micro interactions between adopters and adoption agencies. The article also applies Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to assist in our understanding of how individual agents internalise the messages around them, which can influence and mediate their actions in adoption.
Application
This framework indicates that adoption outcomes for disabled children can only be understood within wider social processes, which can affect not only individual adoptions themselves, but also the practice of adoption generally. This has implications for both research and practice, for if, on the one hand, it provides a more comprehensive framework for the conduct of research, and it also potentially enables practice to be informed by wider considerations other than those occurring in the immediate context of the adoption.
In this article we set out to review the ways in which mothers of disabled children have been portrayed within disability studies and the more broader academic literature. We argue that within disability studies mothers of disabled children occupy a liminal position because they are often not disabled and yet they can experience forms of disablism. Their experiences can differ markedly from the experiences of mothers of non‐disabled children and yet the consequences and outcomes of these experiences, such as developing a ‘special competence’ is largely overlooked. Mothers can work to effect change on behalf of their children and, in some cases, for disabled people more generally, however, this role of activist mother is largely undervalued. The review of literature presented here leads us to conclude that further research needs to be undertaken exploring and highlighting the ways in which mothers of disabled children negotiate, manage and approach their daily lives, operating within what are described by feminist scholars as oppressive mothering ideologies and disabling environments.