Self-advocacy and socially just pedagogy

Discussions of 'special educational needs' (SEN), 'children with SEN' and 'inclusion' continue to portray disabled learners as problematic 'others' to be tolerated and managed (Allan 2004). The neo-liberal prioritisation of entrepreneurship and autonomy create further problems for disabled learners attempting to negotiate an increasingly market-driven education system. This paper comes about as a result of eight-weeks spent as a volunteer in an organisation offering self-advocacy based projects to young people with the label of ‘learning difficulties’, and considers such projects alongside Deleuzoguatarrian Disability Studies discussions of socially just pedagogy. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, and considering desire as productive, it is argued that such projects have the potential to offer an alternative, more engaged and socially-just education to the one currently offered in schools

Book Review: Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces

Book review of - Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces, by Dara Blumenthal, London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014, 248 pp. ISBN 978-1-78-348035-

The (Normal) Non-Normativity of Youth

Youth unnerves us. Awkwardly bridging the space between ‘child’ and ‘adult’, we are delivered demonising depictions of young people (hoodies and hooligans), and working out how to deal with these not-quite children but not-quite-adults is high on policy makers’ agendas (Slater, 2013b). On the other hand, the non-normativity of ‘teenage rebellion’ is considered an ‘identity forming’ rite of passage for young people to cross the border zone between child and adult (Lesko, 2002). We hear, in fact, young people scorned upon for their apolitical, apathetic acceptance of normativity – the youth today a pale reflection of their predecessors (Bennett, 2008). Even our ever-so reasonable politicians tell us that they “[did] things that teenagers do”, before they “pulled [themselves] up and headed in the right [direction]” (Cameron in Watt, 2009). This chapter will explore how, through youth, ‘non-normativity’ emerges as a place allowed, indeed expected, as a stage of ‘normative development’. I will argue, however, that it is a stage only permissible to young people fitting neatly into other culturally privileged positions. Furthermore, it must be played out by meeting other societal expectations (‘masculinity’ - lads will be lads; first heterosexual encounters, and so on) which set young people on the path to normative adulthood. Commercialised and commodified ‘what it is to be young’, I argue, is an illustration of the required flexible neoliberal subject; it is okay to be ‘non-normative’ if ‘non-normativity’ can be compartmentalised, as a phase to be grown-out of, and later periodically bought into. Drawing on fieldwork with disabled young people alongside other cultural and media representations of ‘youth’ and ‘youth culture’, I will argue that perceived ‘non-normativity’ leaves young people not fitting into other culturally privileged positions much more precariously positioned

Normalcy, Intersectionality and Ableism : teaching about and around ‘inclusion’ to future educators

Accessible summary • In this chapter, we talk about teaching university students about inclusion in schools and universities. • We began by focusing our teaching on disabled children and other ‘groups’ such as children of colour. • However, this did not work very well. Our students wrote essays that focused on the differences between disabled and non-disabled people. • We changed our teaching to focus on the problems caused by an unfair society. This has worked better. • We also include disabled people’s personal stories in our teaching

Stepping outside normative neoliberal discourse: youth and disability meet – the case of Jody McIntyre

In May 2010, amidst the ‘global financial crisis’ a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government succeeded a 12-year reign of New Labour in the United Kingdom, and ushered in massive welfare cuts. Although New Labour tabled major welfare and disability benefit reform, they arguably did not activate the harshest of these. This paper focuses on the backlash of youth and disability in the form of demonstrations; two groups that are being hit hard by the political shift to work-first welfare in an era of employment scarcity. The case of young disabled activist Jody McIntyre is used to explore parallels and divergences in neoliberal and ‘populist’ discourses of ‘risky’, troubling’ youth and disability

Constructions, perceptions and expectations of being disabled and young. A critical disability perspective.

This thesis takes a critical disability studies (CDS) approach to explore the concepts of ‘youth’ and ‘disability’. I ask how normative conceptions of youth and disability impact upon the lives of young disabled people and consider how, as youth and disability researchers, we can position young disabled people as active and politically resilient. I argue that thinking about youth, disability and lived-experiences of disabled youth, can teach us less oppressive ways of conceptualising disability and youth, through the notion of becoming-in-the-world-together (Shildrick, 2009). The method/ology I employ is transdisciplinary, postconventionalist (Shildrick, 2009) and auto/ethnographic. Following Hughes, Goodley and Davis (2012) I utilise theories as and when I see them fit for my political purpose. The thesis is divided into two sections. Section One theorises and contextualises youth and disability; whereas Section Two introduces fieldwork and contains three chapters of analysis. There were three contexts to fieldwork. The first two involve using a variety of creative methods to ask two groups of young disabled people in northern England for their utopian, best-ever future world ideas. I call this The Best-Ever Future Worlds Project. The third research context is a three month ethnography with young people involved in the Independent Living Movement (ILM) in Iceland. The stories, ideas and theorisations of all these young people help me to question, queer and crip discourses of youth, adult and disability. Findings highlight the ableism of adulthood and the falsity of conceptualising youth as a time of becoming-independent-adult. I argue it is more useful, inclusive and representative of young people’s lives to consider youth, not as a time of becoming-independent, but a time of expanding networks of interdependency. We see dangerous relationships between disability, youth and sexuality functioning to posit disabled people’s bodies as a) childlike (Johnson, Walmsley, & Wolfe, 2010), b) asexual (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Liddiard, 2012), and c) the property of others, to be subject to intervention (Barton, 1993; McCarthy, 1998). The importance of questioning normative discourses of disability and youth for young disabled people therefore becomes clear. I argue this has to take place both inside and outside academia. Reconceptualising youth and disability requires intersectional approaches to research, transdisciplinary conversations, and the development of spaces in which to be ‘critically young’

“Like, pissing yourself is not a particularly attractive quality, let’s be honest” : learning to contain through youth, adulthood, disability and sexuality

In this article, we (re)conceptualise containment in the context of youth, gender, disability, crip sex/uality and pleasure. We begin by exploring eugenic histories of containment and trace the ways in which the anomalous embodiment of disabled people (Shildrick, 2009) remains vigorously policed within current neo-eugenic discourse. Drawing upon data from two corresponding research studies, we bring the lived experiences of disabled young people to the fore. We explore their stories of performing, enacting and realising containment: containing the posited unruliness of the leaky impaired body; containment as a form of (gendered) labour (Liddiard, 2013a); containment as a marker of normalisation and sexualisation, and thus a necessary component for ableist adulthood (Slater, 2015). Thus, we theorise crip embodiment as permeable, porous and thus problematic in the context of the impossibly bound compulsory (sexually) able adult body (McRuer, 2006). We suggest that the implicit learning of containment is therefore required of disabled young people, particularly women, to counter infantilising and desexualising discourse and cross the 'border zone of youth' (Lesko, 2012) and achieve normative neoliberal adulthood. Crucially, however, we examine the meaning of what we argue are important moments of messiness: the precarious localities of leakage which disrupt containment and thus the 'reality' of the 'able' 'adult' body. We conclude by considering the ways in which these bodily ways of being contour both material experiences of pleasure and the right(s) to obtain it

School toilets : queer, disabled bodies and gendered lessons of embodiment

In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site (Elias, 1978) in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider ‘toilet training’ as a form of ‘civilisation’, that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that ‘toilet training’ continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research