Sonali Shah

Sharing the world: the researcher and the researched

This article explores the methodological opportunities and challenges I encountered, as a disabled researcher, while doing research on the educational experiences and career aspirations of a group of young disabled people, still in full-time mainstream or special education. While the key barriers facing disabled researchers are recognized, they are challenged in this article and rather seen as opportunities. Further, they are diluted by the ontological privileges that are at the disposal of the disabled researcher, including the use of empathy, which provides a way of understanding other peoples experiences in the context of both similarities and differences between the researcher and the researched. This article focuses on three methods of qualitative enquiry – namely, classroom observation, forum theatre workshops and individual interviews. It explores how they were employed to ensure the voices of young disabled people were captured by the research process in ways that reflect their views and recognize them as active social agents who are able to make decisions about their own futures.

Bringing disability history alive in schools: promoting a new understanding of disability through performance methods

The transfer of disability history research to new generation audiences is crucial to allow lessons from the past to impact the future inclusion and equality agenda. As today’s children are the policy makers and the legislators of tomorrow, it is important for them to have opportunities to engage with disability life story narratives to understand personal experiences of disability and the social systems that influenced their construction through time and space. Through the embodiment and manipulation of these powerful narratives, children have the opportunity to challenge traditional perspectives of disability that may be disabling and oppressive. Such materials contribute to the making of an inclusive society by enabling children to craft mechanisms of intervention that can used to build resilience and resistance to barriers, and thereby generate social change. This paper examines how performance techniques can be used as a pedagogical tool to transpose new understandings of disability history and culture to school-based audiences. It builds on two previous projects: one focusing on life history narratives of three generations of disabled people, and the other exploring the potential for text-based disability narratives to move beyond text in interesting and creative ways. In so doing, this paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project which brought together academics (from performance and social science backgrounds), three performing arts secondary schools and disabled theatre performers. It presents qualitative evidence of how performance workshops delivered in three schools, by disabled performers, and stimulated by disability life history research, has the potential to increase disability awareness in the mainstream classroom and challenge negative disability stereotypes that influence how disabled people are made known in society.

Hidden Voices: Disabled Women’s Experiences of Violence and Support Over the Life Course

Violence against women is a worldwide social and human rights problem that cuts across cultural, geographic, religious, social, and economic boundaries. It affects women in countries around the world, regardless of class, religion, disability, age, or sexual identity. International evidence shows that approximately three in five women experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. However, across the globe, women and girls with impairments or life-limiting illnesses are more susceptible to different forms of violence across a range of environments and by different perpetrators including professionals and family members as well as partners. However, they are likely to be seriously disadvantaged in gaining information and support to escape the abusive relationships. This article stems from the United Kingdom part of a comparative study with three other countries (Austria, Germany, and Iceland) funded by the European Commission (EC; 2013-2015). It presents preliminary findings, generated from life history interviews, about disabled women’s experiences of violence and access to support (both formal and informal) over their life course and their aspirations for the prevention of violence in the future. The article includes examples of impairment-specific violence that non-disabled women do not experience. By bringing the voices of disabled women into the public domain, the article will facilitate a historically marginalized group to contribute to the debate about disability, violence, and support.

‘I can’t forget’: Experiences of violence and disclosure in the childhoods of disabled women

Violence against children is a human rights problem that cuts across gender, race, geographical, religious, socio-economic status and cultural boundaries. The risk of violence towards disabled children during their lifetime is three to four times greater than towards non-disabled children. It starts in early childhood, is more severe and linked to disablist structures in society. Violence is perpetrated by individuals and through institutional practices that are part of disabled children’s everyday life. Violence is often misdiagnosed as related to individual impairment, and not recognised by professionals or the victims themselves. Presenting disabled women’s reflections of childhood violence, help-seeking and responses to disclosure, this article seeks to raise an awareness of violence towards disabled girls and the need for these to be recognised as a serious child protection issue to be included in official definitions of child abuse.

Polio monologues: translating ethnographic text into verbatim theatre:

Mass vaccination programmes mean that poliomyelitis is almost a forgotten memory in the Global North. But in reality its effects continue as many people who contracted paralytic polio in childhood may develop functional deterioration (Post-Polio Syndrome or PPS) in later adulthood; mass migration and escape from violence means that it is also re-emerging in contemporary societies. Thus it is crucial for different audiences to have opportunities to engage with, and understand the life histories of polio survivors and their personal experiences of disease and disability across biographical and historical time. This article discusses the process of using recorded delivery verbatim techniques, with disabled and non-disabled actors, to translate ethnographic research about social history of polio into a creative accessible medium for new generation audiences to learn about the hidden, often contested, histories of disability and disease that may collide with professional, medical and public discourse. Our contention is that ethnodrama can give a voice to the voiceless, and enable them to contribute to the production of new knowledge, health interventions and policy instruments that affect their lives.

“Disabled people are sexual citizens too”: supporting sexual identity, well-being, and safety for disabled young people

Disabled young people are sexual beings, and deserve equal rights and opportunities to have control over, choices about and access to their sexuality, sexual expression and fulfilling relationships throughout their lives. This is critical to their overall physical, emotional and social health and wellbeing. However, societal misconceptions of disabled bodies being non-normative, Other or deviant has somewhat shaped how the sexuality of disabled people has been constructed as problematic under the public gaze. The pervasive belief that disabled people are asexual creates barriers to sexual citizenship for disabled young people, causing them to have lower levels of sexual knowledge and inadequate sex education compared to their non-disabled peers. As a consequence they are more vulnerable to ‘bad sex’ - relationships which are considered to be exploitative and disempowering in different ways. Access to good sex and relationships education (SRE) for disabled young people is, therefore, not only important for them to learn about sexual rights, sexual identity and sexual expression, but also about how to ensure their sexual safety. In so doing it will contribute to the empowerment and societal recognition of disabled people as sexual beings, and also help them resist and report sexual violence. Therefore, it is critical that parents, educationalists and health and social care professionals are aware and appropriately equipped with knowledge and resources to formally educate disabled young people about sexuality and wellbeing on par to their non-disabled peers.