Enabling transition into higher education for students with asperger syndrome

This project report provides an insight into the lives of students with Asperger Syndrome (AS) during their transition into higher education. It details the experiences of eight students with AS. Students were interviewed multiple times at various junctures throughout their first academic year. Although they told stories of everyday disabling barriers, they also shared experiences of academic and social successes. The project was primarily focused on students with AS; however, its findings will hopefully help inform inclusive policy and practice within higher education institutions

Dis/ability and austerity: Beyond work and slow death

The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased precarity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics

The dis/ability complex

Diversity studies have much to gain from the interdisciplinary field of critical disability studies. The dis/ability complex acknowledges the mutually inclusive socio-political practices associated with the conceptual co-constitution of disability and ability. Simultaneously, the dis/ability complex recognizes that in order for disablism to be reproduced it requires its hidden referent to be present; namely, ableism. Disability all to often appears in our cultural psyche as a problem of body or mind, as an object of rehabilitative or curative intervention. Ability, meanwhile, is posited as an idealized marker of successful citizenship. In this paper I foreground the dis/ability complex as a guiding subject through which to think a number of important individual and collective processes including labour, emotion, learning, technology, and the anthroposcene. I conclude that all of these intersectional sites of engagement significantly benefit from an engagement with the dis/ ability complex

Depathologising the university

This paper develops a conversation with decolonisation to pitch a novel mode of engagement; depathologising the university. While higher education institutions are in the midst of an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion revolution, I posit that all is not well. Too often disability staff and students have been sidelined in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion discourse and practice and this paper addresses this omission. First, I pose a question ‘what is the university for?’ and consider two recent campaigns by Black and Minority Ethnic and disabled students in the UK that offer partial responses to this question. I argue that these campaigns not only implicate the colonial and ableist heritage of universities but also illuminate two critical modes of engagement: decolonisation and depathologisation. Second, to focus the discussion, I introduce Disability Matters; a new six year programme of research which seeks to promote more inclusive university environments through positioning disability as the driving subject of inquiry. Third, I offer some provisional and anticipatory thoughts by sitting with decolonisation in order to expand upon a project of depathologisation. I conclude with an appeal; desiring disability’s disruptive qualities to rethink the university

Understanding Disability: Biopsychology, Biopolitics, and an In-Between-All Politics

What do disability labels give us and what do they steal from us? How possible is it to live our lives without categories when life – which encompasses these nebulous categories of culture, society and relationships – is so, well, necessarily categorical? These questions are typical of the kinds of questions asked by scholars of critical disability studies which is an interdisciplinary field that brings together people interested in understanding the meaning of disability and contesting the exclusion of disabled people from mainstream society. In this brief provocation I want to explore disability labels through recourse to three perspectives that have much to say about categorisation, disability and the human condition: the biopsychological, the biopolitical and, what I term, an in-between-al politics. It is my view that disability categories intervene in the world in some complex and often contradictory ways. It is up to us to work out how we live with these contradictions. One way of living with contradictions is to work across disciplinary boundaries: thus situating ourselves across divides and embracing uncertainty and contradiction in order to enhance all our lives. I will conclude with some interdisciplinary thoughts for the field of Adapted Physical Activity (APA)

Critical disability studies, Brexit and Trump: a time of neoliberal-ableism

One feels light-headed even trying to decipher the actualities of the global political system and cultural order in light of the traumatic events of Brexit and Trump. One trope worth dissected is that of ableism as an obvious partner of neoliberalism. The concept of neoliberal–ableism captures the elision of key tenets of both processes that emphasise self-containment, autonomy and independence. Such ideas were key to the Trump and Brexit campaigns and now leave us in a dangerous space of isolationism. Trump and Brexit hail in a new kind of neoliberalism; one associated with the rolling out of ableist ideals. And while West might be correct in predicting the death of some elements of late capitalism, we know from history that ability and disability – or dis/ability – are used to restructure political orders. We will consider the rise of neoliberal–ableism as a key guiding ideology of both Brexit and Trump supporters and ask: what does this mean for disabled people? After considering these two historical events we will think of the future and consider some of the ways in which we may respond and resist

Storying disability’s potential

In this paper, we weave in and out of theory and narrative in order to consider the potential of disability and its relationship to knowledge construction. We consider theories to be stories that one can tell about the world. And these theories are enlivened by other stories that we tell about ourselves and the world around us. As disability researchers, we explore the ways in which disability becomes known in the world and we do so through our own tales and theoretical narratives of knowing disability. In telling stories, then, we break down artificial boundaries between theory and narrative. And in theorising our stories – and storying our theories – we seek to explore the potential of disability to unsettle and challenge exclusionary curriculum. This textual assemblage traverses diverse themes including diagnosis, school programming, welfare, transportation, social interaction and access

The desire for new humanisms

This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education, we are mindful of the significance of social theory and its relationship with articulations of social justice. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought we grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. We focus in on the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial and critical disability studies. Our argument considers the problem of humanism (as a product of colonial Western imaginaries), the critical responses offered by posthuman thinking and then seeks to rearticulate forms of new humanism that are responsive to the posthuman condition and, crucially, the political interventions of Postcolonial and Critical Disability Scholars. We then outline six new humanist projects that could productively feed into the work of the Journal of Disability Studies in Education