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

Repurposing the (super)crip: media representations of disability at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games

Mega-events attract ever larger media audiences, and the 2016 Rio Paralympics were no exception. As audiences grow, media coverage extends to ever more varied domains, which are themselves then colonised by an increasing range of discourses. One of main discourses to develop since the early 2000s has been that of the so-called “supercrip”, one which challenges the notion of “impairment” often connected with disability by foregrounding the para-athletes’ triumph over adversity, celebrating instead their courage, grit and perseverance leading to athletic success and personal and increasingly national prestige. In this article we analyse the continuing importance of the supercrip discourse in coverage of the Rio Paralympics, but also move on to highlight its tactical alignment with other – both competing and complementary – discourses of nationalism, sexualisation, militarisation and celebritisation. We analyse textual and visual manifestations of these discourses using both Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis. We conclude by paying particular attention to the increasing visibility of discourses which, while acknowledging the potentially positive role of the supercrip discourse in focussing on athletic success, repurpose that discourse by foregrounding instead the day-to-day experiences of belittling misrepresentation and neglect, including political neglect

Peer advocacy in a personalized landscape:The role of peer support in a context of individualized support and austerity

Whilst personalization offers the promise of more choice and control and wider participation in the community, the reality in the United Kingdom has been hampered by local council cuts and a decline in formal services. This has left many people with intellectual disabilities feeling dislocated from collective forms of support (Needham, 2015). What fills this gap and does peer advocacy have a role to play? Drawing on a co-researched study undertaken with and by persons with intellectual disabilities, we examined what role peer advocacy can play in a context of reduced day services, austerity and individualized support. The findings reveal that peer advocacy can help people reconnect in the face of declining services, problem-solve issues and informally learn knowledge and skills needed to participate in the community. We argue that peer advocacy thus offers a vital role in enabling people to take up many of the opportunities afforded by personalization

Story in health and social care

This paper offers a brief consideration of how narrative, in the form of people‟s own stories, potentially figures in health and social care provision as part of the impulse towards patient-centred care. The rise of the epistemological legitimacy of patients‟ stories is sketched here. The paper draws upon relevant literature and original writing to consider the ways in which stories can mislead as well as illuminate the process of making individual treatment care plans

Challenging Perceptions of Disability through Performance Poetry Methods: The "Seen but Seldom Heard" Project.

This paper considers performance poetry as a method to explore lived experiences of disability. We discuss how poetic inquiry used within a participatory arts-based research framework can enable young people to collectively question society’s attitudes and actions towards disability. Poetry will be considered as a means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people with direct experience of disability can be empowered to develop new skills that enable them to tell their own stories. Discussion of how this can challenge audiences to critically reflect upon their own perceptions of disability will also be developed

Moral wrongs, disadvantages, and disability: a critique of critical disability studies

Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS

The DisHuman child

In this paper we consider the relationship between the human and disability; with specific focus on the lives of disabled children and young people. We begin with an analysis of the close relationship between ‘the disabled’ and ‘the freak’. We demonstrate that the historical markings of disability as object of curiosity and register of fear serve to render disabled children as non-human and monstrous. We then consider how the human has been constituted, particularly in the periods of modernity and the rise of capitalism, reliant upon the naming of disability as antithetical to all that counts as human. In order to find a place for disabled children in a social and cultural context that has historically denied their humanity and cast them as monstrous others, we develop the theoretical notion of the DisHuman: a bifurcated complex that allows us recognise their humanity whilst also celebrating the ways in which disabled children reframe what it means to be human. We suggest that the lives of disabled children and young people demand us to think in ways that affirm the inherent humanness in their lives but also allow us to consider their disruptive potential: this is our DisHuman child. We draw on our research projects to explore three sites where the DisHuman child emerges in moments where sameness and difference, monstrosity/disability and humanity are invoked simultaneously. We explore three locations – (i) DisDevelopment; (ii) DisFamily and (iii) DisSexuality – illuminating the ways in which the DisHuman child seeks nuanced, politicized and complicating forms of humanity

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