This book offers a unique approach to the study of disabled children’s views, articulating methodological reflections, findings and experiences from a study conducted with children with diagnoses of autism and their parents. The reader is invited to engage with the ways the children reclaimed their social agency and multiple ways of knowing and being, through creative encounters where mattering and autonomy were protected. Weaving together arts-based research, art activism, multimodality and Gramsci’s study of language and social hierarchies, the analysis unpacks the oppressive systems that serve to dehumanise and stifle children’s identities and agency, reshape parenthood and obscure capabilities.
The author addresses the need for autonomy in ethical research with disabled children and communities to encourage scholars, community-responsive practitioners, educators and artists, to think critically about freedom and the directive practices that pervade children’s lives. This is an urgent call to question the ways disabled children’s freedom of expression is easily sacrificed, enmeshed in rhetoric, bureaucracy and habit. The dialogue between the narrative and the artworks open up diverse channels for hope, respect, and attentiveness towards children’s self-expression, inviting adults/educators/researchers to be present, to problematise and resist direction in research, education and other interactions.
Chapter 01: Disrupting Habits Disrupting Justice.
Chapter 02: Crafting
an Experiential and Relational Methodology.
Chapter 03: Recruitment,
Representation and the Social Purpose of Research Destabilising
Methodological Habits.
Chapter 04: Theoretical Perspectives, Intra-action
and Analysis.
Chapter 05: Creative Encounters.
Chapter 06: Childrens
Perceptions and Experiences of Social Structures and Distinctions.
Chapter
07: Threads of Experience: Love and Resistance in the Interviews with Mothers
and Fathers.
Chapter 08: The Role and Potential of Radical Relational
Research.
Francesca Bernardi is an independent scholar, artist and speaker. Her socially-engaged work with individuals navigating dis/ability, cultural and social exclusions, is non-hierarchical decolonial and multimodal, rooted in arts-informed methodologies, critical dis/ability studies and social pedagogy. She is the founding chair of the Antonio Gramsci Society UK, an international forum for accessible civic engagement, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, editorial board member of Disability & Society, member of CATA-ACAT, and the Marxist Education Project.
