Disability: sameness and difference

Kirsten StalkerUniversity of Strathclyde Faculty of

EducationProfessorial Lecture Series

18 November 2008

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Britain’s Missing Top Model: the contestants

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The lucky winner

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Quotes on sameness/ difference

• Professional talking about children with learning disabilities: They’re not like normal children, you see.

• Teenager/ wheelchair user: We’re just the same. We just can’t walk, that’s all the difference.

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Quotes on sameness/ difference

• Teenager with learning disabilities: How come I’m different from my brothers and I’m stupid and how come my nephew can count and I can’t and he’s 7?

• Sibling talking about her disabled sister: She’s different but it’s normal for us.

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Quotes on sameness/ difference

• Young man: My disability encompasses all of me: it is central to my identity.

• Teenager (girl): Every normal kid has to grow up and have freedom and so do we. And if we make mistakes, we make mistakes; we’re just like any other kid.

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Quotes on sameness/ difference

• Adult with learning disabilities:I don’t know if it’s kind o’ a threat that we’re different…there just seems to be this ‘because [you’re] different, we’re going to treat you different’…it doesn’t matter what disability a person has, everybody’s got a right to have access wherever they’ve got to go to.

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Theorising Difference

1. Correcting/ challenging false generalisations which are implicit in much classic thought about everyday life

- Calhoun et al (2002)

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Theorising Difference

2: Questioning whether certain social categories that we often take for granted really have objective and stable meanings

- Calhoun et al (2002)

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Theorising Difference

3: Thinking about the role which the ideas attached to certain categories may play in structuring society itself

- Calhoun et al (2002)

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1: Correcting false generalisations

Study of disabled children’s everyday lives• 26 children aged 7 -15• Range of impairments• Attending mainstream and special

schools• Used variety of communication methods

Connors and Stalker 2007

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2: Does disability have an objective and stable meaning?

Children experienced disability in 4 ways:

ImpairmentPhysical barriersOther people’s attitudesThe management of difference

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Children’s views

• “That's it. I’m in a wheelchair so just get on with it. Just get on with what you’re doing” (boy aged 9)

• “I don’t mind if it’s wee boys or girls that look at me but if it’s adults…they should know. It’s as if they’ve never seen a wheelchair before and they have, eh?” (boy aged 14)

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Children’s views

• “No. I just bully them back. Or if they started kicking us, I’d kick them back.” (young boy with learning disabilities)

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Children’s views

Mother: “He was telling me the other day how they did the fire alarm and everybody was screaming out in the playground. Richard was still in the school. He was saying ‘Mum, I was really really worried about what happens if there’s a real fire’. No-one came to his assistance at all.”

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Children’s views

• Girl “…there’s signing, where everyone signs, all the teachers, all the children.Researcher: Why is that better than going to a school with hearing children?Girl: Hearing children – no one signs. I don’t understand them and they don’t understand me”.

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3: The role which ideas attached to certain categories may play in

structuring society itself

Ideas attached to the category ‘learning disability’

• ‘othering’ and exclusion

• care and protection

• justice and rights

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Some concluding thoughts about…

• the role of research• common sense understandings of

disability• social constructionist view of

disability• significance of impairment• a continuum of impairment?

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Concluding thoughts

• no objective stable meaning of disability

• differences among disabled people

• the way we think about disability has profound influence on everyday lives

• celebrating difference and diversity

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Thank you for listening!