Encounters with Translations of Happiness

This special issue edited by Katie Aubrecht demonstrates that a focus on translations of happiness makes us attend to the interpretive process animating social relations. There are many registers of translation that individuals, communities, and the state make use of as they grapple with relations to happiness. Among the vast array of historical registers that aim to make happiness comprehensible or compelling, medicine and politics are two of the most noteworthy. Moving from one register to another, such as from institutional versions of happiness as a medically regulated matter, to its appearance in situations of war, trauma, illness, local community or state, between these differing registers, we come to re-encounter happiness in many important ways as this special issue demonstrates. This issue thus invites its readers to question modernity’s progressive interest in and use of happiness as a way to narrate and assemble our essential inter-relatedness

The additional labour of a disabled PhD student

This is a personal account of the challenges I have faced during the first year and a half of my PhD, solely due to my identity as a disabled student. I address issues such as a lack of representation when researching PhD life, the impact of the services which are meant to be there to help and the complexities of juggling the additional time-consuming events which occur when you are disabled, with PhD time, a home life and work. This is especially relevant in the United Kingdom at this time as the Disabled Students Allowance has recently been cut back, meaning there is less support available for disabled students, and with the increased marketisation of higher education it could be argued that there is less impetus for universities to support those who have non-standard needs

“The embodiment of pure thought”? Digital fabrication, disability and new possibilities for auto/biography

This essay draws on findings from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project: “In the Making” (AH/M006026/1) to argue that the digital turn in art therapy – particularly 3D printing – makes possible new forms of disability agency, engaging post-humanist theory to suggest re-conceptualizations of embodied person-hood. Keywords: digital fabrication; disability; auto/biography; embodimen

‘I had to pop a wheelie and pay extra attention in order not to fall:’ embodied experiences of two wheelchair tennis athletes transgressing ableist and gendered norms in disability sport and university spaces

When bodies move in certain contexts, it can mean very different things for different people. In our society, some bodies are more valued than others, and detrimentally, this can mean that certain types of bodies are ostracised and segregated to the outskirts of production economies and society. Dis/ability sport spaces, able-bodied sports spaces and able-bodied university spaces have been an under-researched area when considering how the body moves throughout these spaces for elite wheelchair athletes taking part in university courses. To learn more, this paper drew on feminist poststructuralism and new materialist perspectives and shared an insight into how two athletes with dis/abilities transgressed abled and gendered norms in different spaces and how they positioned themselves as athletic bodies and disabled bodies in these spaces. Employing a post-critical ethnographic design, we found that dependent on the space a dis/abled body is in constant flux as to when it feels marginalised and different (typically able-bodied spaces) and when it feels included, valued, and strong (typically dis/abled spaces). Significantly, the materiality of the institutional structures of universities, founded upon historic aesthetics of beauty dictated the physical spaces the athletes entered and created spaces of exclusion based on capitalist and ableist ideologies

Considering Covid-19: Autoethnographic reflections on working practices in a time of crisis by two disabled UK academics

COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused dramatic changes in all aspects of daily life. As the British public was ordered to stay at home, non-essential businesses shut their doors, resulting in an abrupt shift in working practices towards home working. In higher education, university campuses closed to students and staff. In this article, two disabled lecturers working in higher education in the UK reflect on their experiences during this rapid shift in working practices. With a particular focus on how their different impairments intersected with the changes occurring during this time, they employ autoethnography as an emancipatory method to consider the ways in which their working lives were impacted by the decisions made during this period. As well as illuminating their own individual experiences, they use these accounts to consider the wider implications for disabled students and academics. They conclude that, whilst this has been a period of challenge, uncertainty and rapid change, there are also lessons to be learnt regarding accessibility and the possibility for adaptation going forward, for staff and students alike. They suggest that as we emerge from this period of crisis, we need to use these experiences as leverage for positive change; for designing ways of teaching and learning that accommodate everyone, rather than getting swept up in an unthinking pursuit of returning to ‘business as usual’

Protecting the rights of pupils with autism when meeting the challenge of behaviour

Accessible Summary Pupils with autism are often physically handled in schools without teachers realising that this can be distressing for them. Many teachers do not know about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Teachers need support with developing their understanding of how pupils experience being handled. It is important that the rights of disabled pupils are recognised and protected. Summary ‘Positive handling’ has become a popular intervention within education and other services in England in the management of behaviours that challenge. This paper uses a vignette of an observation of the handling of children with autism as a starting point for consideration of whether this practice can ever really be experienced as positive or whether it is often little more than a mechanism of control that disregards the rights of disabled children and young people. All schools are mandated under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to protect the rights of disabled pupils but to date there has been very little engagement by teachers with this agenda. This paper identifies some of the rights of pupils that are negated through current practice and evaluates what support Prouty’s principles of pre-therapy from the field of counselling might offer teachers with developing a rights based agenda.</p

The Care Work of Access

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities

Public health, research and rights : the perspectives of deliberation panels with politically and socially active disabled people

Public health research purports to provide the evidence base for policies, programmes and interventions to improve the health of a population. However, there is increasing awareness that the experiences of disabled people have played little part in informing this evidence base. This paper discusses one aspect of a study commissioned by England’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to review the implications for public health of theories and models of disability. This part of the study focused on the development of a tool or decision aid to promote ethical inclusion of disabled people in public health randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and evaluative research. The tool was introduced at four regional ‘deliberating panels’ involving politically and socially active disabled people. In addition, we held a panel with public health professionals. The deliberation panels debated how the focus of public health was narrowing, why disability was excluded and positive and negative issues with using rights to guide research and evaluative practice. Politically active disabled people argued for a social model of human rights to guide any rights based tools or decision aids in public health and disability research

The interactions of disability and impairment

Theoretical work on disability is going through an expansive period, built on the growing recognition of disability studies as a discipline and out of the political and analytical push to bring disability into a prominent position within accounts of the intersecting social categories that shape people's lives. A current debate within critical disability studies is whether that study should include impairment and embodiment within its focus. This article argues it should and does so by drawing from symbolic interactionism and embodiment literatures in order to explore how differences in what bodies can do-defined as impairments-come to play a role in how people make sense of themselves through social interaction. We argue that these everyday interactions and the stories we tell within them and about them are important spaces and narratives through which impairment and disability are produced. Interactions and stories are significant both in how they are shaped by wider social norms, collective stories and institutional processes, and also how they at times can provide points of resistance and challenges to such norms, stories and institutions. Therefore, the significance of impairment and interaction is the role they play in both informing self-identity and also broader dynamics of power and inequality