Dan Goodley

Towards socially just pedagogies: Deleuzoguattarian critical disability studies

Socially just pedagogies call for sensitivity to politics and culture. In this paper I will uncover some key challenges in relation to working pedagogically with disabled people through the exploration of a critical disability studies perspective. First, I will unpack some of the assumptions that underpin educational understandings of ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’, suggesting that we need to engage more willingly with politicized and socially constructed ideas in relation to these phenomena. Second, I will raise questions about the current aims of pedagogy in relation to the market and the autonomous learner. In light of the market—and the subject it produces—I will argue that ‘disability and ‘impairment’ demand critical researchers to think more creatively about setting the conditions for experimenting with socially just pedagogies. Third, with this experimentation in mind, I will draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to think of socially just pedagogies in terms of rhizomes (n – 1); productive models of desire and planes of immanence. These concepts construct pedagogies as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’—opening up resistant spaces and potential territories of social justice—all of them uncertain.

Dis/entangling critical disability studies

Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging insights, including theorizing through materialism, bodies that matter, inter/trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and Other. I briefly disentangle these themes and suggest that while we may well start with disability, we often never end with it as we engage with other transformative arenas including feminist, critical race and queer theories. Yet critical disability studies reminds us of the centrality of disability when we consider the politics of life itself. In this sense, then, disability becomes entangled with other forms of oppression and revolutionary responses.

Dis/ability Studies : Theorising disablism and ableism

Preface Part 1: Finding Dis/ability Studies 1. Disablism 2. Ableism 3. Intersectionality 4. Dis/ability Studies 5. Researching Dis/ability Part 2: Exemplifying Dis/ability Studies 6. Precarious Bodies: The Biopolitics of Dis/ability and Debility 7. Becoming Inclusive Education: Cripping Neoliberal-able Schooling 8. The Psychopathology of the Normals: Why People are so Messed up Around Dis/ability 9. Markets, Cruel Optimism and Civil Society: Producing Dis/ability 10. Critical Dis/ability Studies

Storying Disability and Impairment: Retrospective Accounts of Disabled Family Life

Much previous British research on disability and its effects on family life has seen impairment as a personal or family tragedy. In this article, the authors describe current English research that is asking families about their experiences of professional health and social care support since the birth of their disabled child. Interviews with the families uncovered a range of themes that challenged the personal tragedy approach. Far from being passive recipients of care, these are ordinary families seeking appropriate information from professionals to support them in their ordinary parenting role. For them, the professionalized care service should be based on negotiated relationships of equality that give respect to parental perspectives on what is right for their child. The authors conclude that these data are useful in describing ongoing barriers to enabling care provision and in offering a positive view of disabled family life.

Empowerment, self-advocacy and resilience

This article critiques the relationship between the aims of ‘learning disability’ policy and the realities of the self-advocacy movement. A previous study found that self-advocacy can be defined as the public recognition of the resilience of people with learning difficulties. In the current climate of Valuing People, partnership boards and ‘user empowerment’, understanding resilience is crucial to the support of authentic forms of self-advocacy. This article aims to address such a challenge. First, understandings of resilience in relation to self-empowerment and self-advocacy are briefly considered. Second, the current policy climate and service provision rhetoric are critically explored. Third, it is argued that we need to recognize how self-advocacy groups celebrate resilience through a variety of social and identity-shifting actions. How current policy responds to these aspects of resilience is questioned. It is concluded that the lived reality of self-advocacy needs to be foregrounded in any attempt to understand empowerment.

Locating Self-advocacy in Models of Disability: Understanding disability in the support of self-advocates with learning difficulties

Recent appraisals of self-advocacy groups of people with learning difficulties have tended to focus on the constitutional and structural facets of groups whilst failing to explicitly engage with di...

Epistemological journeys in participatory action research: alliances between community psychology and disability studies

This paper seeks to explore emancipatory disability research possibilities through the use of participatory action research and the cross‐fertilisation of ideas between British disability studies (DS) and community psychology (CP). First, we consider the psychology in CP and suggest that it is far removed from mainstream psychology’s pathological vision of disabled people. Second, we draw on Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) model of paradigms to interrogate research practice in DS and CP. Third, we compare and contrast research narratives from DS and CP through reference to some examples of our own research. We argue that CP pays particular attention to the development of community selves and cultural identities within the participatory action research process: which we feel to be a key concern for the development of an emancipatory DS. We conclude that recognising the radical humanist element of participatory action research (PAR) permits us to navigate an enabling journey for disability research.

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.

Becoming rhizomatic parents: Deleuze, Guattari and disabled babies

In order for the sociological study of disability to enable, then it must be ready to conceptualize complex terrains of knowledge and activism. Research has to work alongside disabled people, their allies, their practices, their resistances and their theorizing. This paper makes a case for a framework of understanding that situates such work. Disability studies tends to understand its concepts (e.g. disability, exclusion, inclusion, impairment, politicization, people) as entities rooted in arborescent and hierarchical forms of knowledge. These modernist misconceptions can be challenged through understanding knowledge, practice, living and activism as rhizomatic, captured as lines of flight which are always becoming. As a new reader of Deleuze and Guattari, I make a case for disability research understanding parents and their disabled children as deconstructing or (re)deterritorializing the areas of policy, politics, practice, theory and activism. Creating burrows for shelter and eventual breakout, becoming ‘angel makers’, drawing on narratives of parents of disabled babies, this paper maps out a vision of parents not blocked by the strata of disabling society, but enabled by lines of flight, resistance, flux and change. This paper aims to be Deleuzoguattarian but only in ways that fit the complexities of parents’ accounts.

Emancipating play: dis/abled children, development and deconstruction

This paper reflects critically on the meaning of play, especially as it relates to disabled children and their experiences. We explore the close alliance of play to cognitive and social development, particularly in the case of psychologies of development, and reveal a dominant discourse of the disabled child as a non‐playing object that requires professional therapeutic intervention. We argue that this pathologisation of play on the part of disabled children is closely tied to normalisation of childhood, in which non‐normal bodies are increasingly expected to be governed and corrected not only by professionals but also by parents/carers. In order to rescue more enabling visions of the disabled child and their play we turn to three perspectives – the new sociology of childhood; social oppression theories of disability; critical developmental psychology. These resources, we suggest, allow us to reconfigure what we mean by play and disability in a contemporary climate that celebrates competition and marketisation over the intrinsic potentialities of all children. We argue that how we conceive play will per se undermine or promote forms of inclusive research, policy and practice.