Webinar: Childhood and Disability
When: Tuesday, February 25, 2025, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Online
Join us for the third in a series of four webinars organised by the Childhood, Law & Policy Network. This series explores social issues relating to children and their bodies. The third webinar will focus on childhood and disability.
Topics and speakers
‘Disabled Girlhood and Platform Intimacies’
Speaker: Dr Anastasia Todd (Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky)
In this presentation, I introduce and discuss the utility of the heuristic that I developed in my book project, “cripping girlhood.” I hone in on disabled girls’ self-representational practices on two platforms—YouTube and TikTok—in order to explore how disabled girls subvert normative expectations for disabled girlhood, or “crip girlhood.” Through producing and uploading videos, disabled girls re-author the meanings of their bodyminds in their own terms. I end with a discussion of new directions for this research, toward a more sustained recognition of the intersection of the material and digital, or what I term platform intimacies.
‘“The Pursuit of Development”: Deconstructing Developmentalism from a Critical Disability Studies and Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies Perspective’
Speaker: Dr Antonios Ktenidis (Lecturer in Education in the School of Education, University of Sheffield)
In this presentation, Antonios will explore the foundational concepts of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies (DCCS), emphasising their significance in understanding the intersections of disability and childhood. The discussion will center on developmentalism as a pervasive discourse that shapes societal perceptions of (disabled) childhoods. Antonios will analyse the intersections of developmentalism with ableism, colonialism, and heightism, particularly in relation to growth charts, which often serve as instruments of measurement that reinforce normative standards of development. By critically examining how these intersecting ideologies impact the lived experiences of disabled children, this presentation aims to highlight the need to challenge prevailing narratives and advocate for a reimagining of developmental paradigms that acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of disabled childhoods.
‘Regarding the disabled child / Thinking with and against narrative’
Speaker: Dr Harriet Cooper (Lecturer in Medical Education (Humanities and Sociology), University of East Anglia)
The disabled child in Anglo-American cultural contexts is often figured as ‘exceptional’ and as the exception that demands an emotional response from the interlocutor (Mollow, 2012; Puar, 2017). For Puar (2017), this lens facilitates and structures a politics of (so-called) inclusion that relies on an exclusionary understanding of disability. That is, forms of population-level debilitation are effectively excluded from the category of disability in order for disability to appear as such (Puar, 2017). Puar draws our attention to geopolitical contexts of debilitation that are rendered external to the economies of representation of disability studies in the Global North.
In this work-in-progress paper, I try to draw out some of the connections between the exceptionalism Puar (2017) identifies and the contemporary prevalence of the notion that ‘everyone has a story to tell’ (Poletti, 2011). Focusing in particular on Anglo-American life-writing by parents of disabled children in the era of platform capitalism and entrepreneurial subjectivity (Hakim, 2019; Han, 2017), I explore how the proliferation of life-writing foregrounds the disabled child as an individual with a narrative. What are the ethical and political consequences of a cultural turn to the individual’s ‘story’ for the many disabled and dying children who do not – who cannot – appear as individuals, and whose lives are not available for narration?