Reading Rosie: The postmodern disabled child

Abstract

This paper reads disabled childhoods in a number of distinct ways in order to stimulate debate around the kinds of stories that researchers and practitioners tell about the children that they work with. Narratives of bio-power – discourses of the self – have expanded as knowledge from the human and social sciences grow and institutions of society become more pronounced. Nowhere is this growth of bio-power more evident than in the lives of disabled children. It is becoming increasingly apparent that distinct bio-political discourses are building up around disabled children at the same time as these children have become the focus of participation, policy and service provision. Consequently, we believe the time is ripe to step back from the current discursive context to question how we as researchers and practitioners understand the disabled children whom we work with. Our aim, then, is to deliberately and self-consciously read the story of Rosie – a disabled child we have worked with in our research – guided by four disability discourses, with an emphasis on making this reading useful to practitioners in the area of childhood and disability.The first reading attends to the teachings of what we describe below as the autism canon, the second reading is located in an orthodox social model approach to disability, the third draws on a Nordic relational model of disability, and the fourth is filtered through what we term a socio-cultural lens. In narrating Rosie from different discursive repertoires, our aim is to explicate different understandings of disability and child that emerge and to warn against the dominance of readings which threaten to pathologise, other and separate disabled children from their peers, their families and the wider community.