DRF Event 8! June 6th join Kerri Betts and Susy Ridout for their talks: “Towards Voluntary Visibility: A New Generation of Autism Narratives?” and “Neurodivergent Inertia or Neurotypical Barriers? A Critical Perspective on the Inclusion of Neurodivergent Voices in Recovery from Gender-Based Violence.”

Time: 1-3pm

To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drf-seminar-series-20212022-event-8-tickets-339781785467

Talk 1, Title: Towards Voluntary Visibility: A New Generation of Autism Narratives?

Talk 1, Abstract:

How can we consider a text to be an autism narrative if it never actually mentions autism? How can we come to appreciate difference and disability when it may not be labelled as such? This paper asserts that considering these two questions in conversation with one another invites us to reflect on the double bind that autistic communities find themselves in: Make your care needs visible and have assumptions made about your abilities and capacities/ Mask your difficulties and be accused of not needing the appropriate care.

I build on Foucault’s notion of ‘compulsory visibility’ to construct my own ‘voluntary visibility’ to highlight how refusing to be immediately available or performatively transparent is a form of resistance. Of course, the importance of identity, labels and diagnoses can only be decided by the individual themselves and this paper does not aim to undermine the importance of this within self-advocacy and autistic culture, it simply aims to reframe the value of this disclosure being a choice rather than the only means of accessing care and inclusion.

Through Katherine May’s recent memoir Wintering I examine how the narrative reorients focus on the environment and dependency. As an autistic author, May’s writing is undeniably informed by her autistic perspective yet upon first reading, autism is absent from the text entirely. I explore how, in discussing the themes that orbit autism rather than autism directly, May demands that readers reconsider how they perceive disability by destabilising ideas of rugged independence towards a community of interdependence.

Talk 2, Title: Neurodivergent Inertia or Neurotypical Barriers? A Critical Perspective on the Inclusion of Neurodivergent Voices in Recovery from Gender-Based Violence.

Talk 2, Abstract: (Suzy has requested a Trigger Warning for this talk – issues of rape will be discussed)

This talk address a number of critical issues which highlight why the voices of neurodivergent victim-survivors of gender-based violence often go unheard. Matters impacting on neurodivergent individuals generally can be seen to be different in many ways to those impacting on the predominant neurotype. This is even more the case when gender-based violence and trauma form part of the narrative.

Taking a critical look at some of the key issues informing this agenda, Dr Ridout will highlight barriers neurodivergent individuals experience which lead to the absence of their voices in debates around recovery. The presentation comes from an insider perspective, as Dr Ridout is a neurodivergent victim-survivor of gender-based violence. It highlights pertinent aspects, such as disclosure, agency and inclusion, in relation to neurodivergent survivors more generally and weaves throughout the presentation some concerns that have impacted her recovery pathway.

Biography

Dr Susy Ridout joined Oxford Brookes University as an Associate Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Faculty of Technology, Design and the Environment in September 2019. She has spent over a decade supporting and tutoring neurodivergent and disabled students. Central to her work are the identification of communication preferences and methods to locate neurodivergent voices and those of victim-survivors to the fore in research, services and debate. Through a wide range of publications and practice, Susy has brought insider expertise to her work on Autism and Mental Wellbeing in Higher Education and Neurodiversity, Autism and Recovery from Sexual Violence. This is critical at a time where prevalence of gender-based violence and a failure to bring perpetrators to account are at an all-time high. Within this narrative, there is a glaring omission of neurodivergent voices, and, it is argued that as a neurodivergent survivor, Susy’s involvement is well-placed to look critically at issues behind this agenda.

Susy has previously held a number of teaching roles in Cuba (dance), Spain (English) and the UK (English, Neurodiversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing).

Online seminar – Disabled Young People’s experience of Personal Support: Intimacies, identities and embodiments in Personal Assistance Relationships

Wed, 25 May 2022, 15:30 – 17:00 BST

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/disabled-young-peoples-experience-of-personal-support-tickets-327938732577

Ned Coleman-Fountain University of Northumbria

Harvey Humphrey University of Strathclyde

Alex Toft Nottingham Centre for Children

This presentation will explore some themes from an ongoing project looking at young disabled adults’ experiences of getting support from Personal Assistants (PAs). PAs are social care workers employed directly by disabled people. They provide important support that enable disabled people to live independent lives. This project has asked young people with a range of different genders and sexualities about their experiences of choosing and working with PAs. This presentation will explore how gender and sexuality, understood in relation to identities and embodiments, matter for the decisions young LGBT people make to ensure they get the right support.

Ned Coleman-Fountain  (he/him) 

Senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Northumbria, where he is currently EDI lead in the Department of Social Sciences. His current research focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality in the contexts of adult social care

Alex Toft

Research Fellow in the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses upon sexuality, gender, disability, spirituality and identity. He currently works with a Young Disabled LGBT+ Researchers Group exploring the lived experiences of young people who are autistic and LGBT+.

Harvey Humphrey

(they/them/their)

really likes poetry

creative flair

A poststructuralist sociologist

they really like language, discourse and bodies

they’re just a bit interdisciplinary

and into creative methodologies

On an ESRC postdoc fellowship

at the University of Strathclyde

making a play out of scholarship

writing poems on the side

DRF Event 7 – May 17th, postponed due to sickness

Last Chance to get tickets! DRF Event 7! May 17th join Emma Pullen and Laura Mora alongside Lucia Amber for their talks “Cripvertising: Paralympians’ gendered representations of disability on Instagram” and “Reimagining rehabilitative futurism using the social model and other ingredients”

Time: Noon – 2pm

To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/copy-of-drf-seminar-series-20212022-event-7-tickets-328135300517

Talk 1, Title: Cripvertising: Paralympians’ gendered representations of disability on Instagram

Talk 1, Abstract: Paralympic athletes increasingly turn to social media platforms to promote the Games, brand the self and raise disability awareness. In doing so, Paralympians create images that challenge dominant stereotypes around disability, particularly at the intersection of gender and sexuality. Through a visual media analysis, we examine the self-representations of the 22 most popular female UK Paralympians on Instagram and the ways in which they use postfeminist discourse to rebrand and popularise disability. Our paper marks the introduction of crip theory to this area of scholarship to critically examine the role of biopolitical discourses in shaping the conditions under which disability is granted visibility in the attention economy. By coining the term ‘cripvertising’, we develop a feminist account of newly emerging archetypes of disabled femininity that are underpinned by a hierarchy of heteronormative attractiveness and marketability. In highlighting this new normativity, we interrogate these images’ emancipatory potential for wider disability communities.

Talk 2, Title: Reimagining rehabilitative futurism using the social model and other ingredients

Talk 2, Abstract:

I want to take you with me to create something new. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I do have some ingredients that I have encountered along my academic journey. Whilst each element exists on its own, when blended together they will hopefully transform each other, either by complimenting or clashing for something unknown to emerge.

These are the ingredients:

Rehabilitative futurism is a concept I first heard at DRF some years ago, thanks to Harriet Cooper. It imagines a future world where illness is eradicated from the body through medical intervention. This is a process that disabled children endure in the name of normalisation and improved futures. 

The well known social model, that separates disability and impairment, states that it is not bodies that are in need of change, but society. It advocates for adapting environments and changing attitudes to include different bodies, without those bodies changing.

The personal recovery model of mental illness is a user-led concept that rejects the idea that recovery has to equal a medicalised cure. Recovery is all about living well with mental illness however it is apparent. It advocates for social inclusion and other ways of valuing people’s worth out of the norms of economic worth. 

This discussion will go into more detail about each ingredient and then blend them together, asking the questions: what if we transformed rehabilitative futurism with the social model? How about we add the recovery model too? What would that look like?  

Whilst I may go some way to offering answers, my hope is that you will join in and create something new with me!

I am Lucia Amber (Was Radcliffe and Coello-Lage in previous incarnations). I studied a Ba in Education and Disability Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 2013. I have since become settled on the Msc in Mental health recovery and social inclusion, an online-only course run by the University of Hertfordshire. The course mixes people living with mental ill-health and those who surround us, professionally and personally, and works from a similar lens as disability studies.  I am interested in the power of language and words, as well as creating new lenses to see the world.

An evening with Shahd Alshammari – author of ‘Head Above Water’

Please register using the Eventbrite.

DRF Event 7! May 17th join Emma Pullen and Laura Mora alongside Lucia Amber for their talks “Cripvertising: Paralympians’ gendered representations of disability on Instagram” and “Reimagining rehabilitative futurism using the social model and other ingredients”

Time: Noon – 2pm

To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/copy-of-drf-seminar-series-20212022-event-7-tickets-328135300517

Talk 1, Title: Cripvertising: Paralympians’ gendered representations of disability on Instagram

Talk 1, Abstract: Paralympic athletes increasingly turn to social media platforms to promote the Games, brand the self and raise disability awareness. In doing so, Paralympians create images that challenge dominant stereotypes around disability, particularly at the intersection of gender and sexuality. Through a visual media analysis, we examine the self-representations of the 22 most popular female UK Paralympians on Instagram and the ways in which they use postfeminist discourse to rebrand and popularise disability. Our paper marks the introduction of crip theory to this area of scholarship to critically examine the role of biopolitical discourses in shaping the conditions under which disability is granted visibility in the attention economy. By coining the term ‘cripvertising’, we develop a feminist account of newly emerging archetypes of disabled femininity that are underpinned by a hierarchy of heteronormative attractiveness and marketability. In highlighting this new normativity, we interrogate these images’ emancipatory potential for wider disability communities.

Talk 2, Title: Reimagining rehabilitative futurism using the social model and other ingredients

Talk 2, Abstract:

I want to take you with me to create something new. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I do have some ingredients that I have encountered along my academic journey. Whilst each element exists on its own, when blended together they will hopefully transform each other, either by complimenting or clashing for something unknown to emerge.

These are the ingredients:

Rehabilitative futurism is a concept I first heard at DRF some years ago, thanks to Harriet Cooper. It imagines a future world where illness is eradicated from the body through medical intervention. This is a process that disabled children endure in the name of normalisation and improved futures. 

The well known social model, that separates disability and impairment, states that it is not bodies that are in need of change, but society. It advocates for adapting environments and changing attitudes to include different bodies, without those bodies changing.

The personal recovery model of mental illness is a user-led concept that rejects the idea that recovery has to equal a medicalised cure. Recovery is all about living well with mental illness however it is apparent. It advocates for social inclusion and other ways of valuing people’s worth out of the norms of economic worth. 

This discussion will go into more detail about each ingredient and then blend them together, asking the questions: what if we transformed rehabilitative futurism with the social model? How about we add the recovery model too? What would that look like?  

Whilst I may go some way to offering answers, my hope is that you will join in and create something new with me!

I am Lucia Amber (Was Radcliffe and Coello-Lage in previous incarnations). I studied a Ba in Education and Disability Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 2013. I have since become settled on the Msc in Mental health recovery and social inclusion, an online-only course run by the University of Hertfordshire. The course mixes people living with mental ill-health and those who surround us, professionally and personally, and works from a similar lens as disability studies.  I am interested in the power of language and words, as well as creating new lenses to see the world.

One week to go! DRF Event 6! May 9th join Toni Paxford and Shahd Alshammari for their talks on “Crip time and disability” and “Writing Disability and Narrating Pain: A Middle Eastern Perspective”

Time: 2-4pm

Presenter 1, Name: Toni Paxford

Presenter 2, Name: Shahd Alshammari

To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drf-seminar-series-20212022-event-6-tickets-306289378777

Talk 1, Title: Crip time and Disability

Talk 1, Abstract:

In this talk I will share the findings of my undergraduate research which examined how youth and community work practitioners in a small organisation understand the concept of crip time.

The research focused on the three research questions: What do practitioners understand about crip time theory; How does crip time theory effect practitioners’ practice; and how can practitioners use crip time theory to inform their practices with young people with invisible illnesses. The data was collected through using insider, action, qualitative research methods, whilst the literature utilised a plethora of different sources including disability studies and youth and community work literature.

In this talk I will discuss my methods, findings, and recommendations in order to continue the conversation around crip time and youth work as well as devise a tangible way forward to encourage and promote positive change in practices.

Talk 2, Title: Writing Disability and Narrating Pain: A Middle Eastern Perspective

Talk 2, Abstract: In this talk, I discuss Disability Studies from a non-Western model. Disability Studies is almost unheard of in the MENA region. As a scholar living with disability, I have paved the way throughout exploring how disability features in literature, Middle Eastern television and pop culture, and I have also written the first memoir from the MENA region about disability and academic ableism. I share the process of writing disability and discuss how Western publishers received the work. I will examine some of these responses critically to explore how disability from a non-western perspective is received both in the West and the MENA region. A personal perspective is offered to navigate this complex terrain and I conclude my talk with an excerpt from Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness (Neem Tree Press, London, 2022).

Virtual Workshop: “Meeting the screenwriting skills gap: Evolving innovation in the British film industry through mental health and disability equality”

*Posted on behalf of Jason Lee (CJP Lee), Professor of Film, Media and Culture and Chartered Psychologist*

When: Wednesday May 18th. 1-2.30pm

If you want to sign up to this event please visit the eventbrite page

This workshop is relevant to everyone who is interested in teaching and researching film and TV, PG students, and those working in the film and TV industries. We hope those who attend will become involved in the films we are going to make. Held on MS Teams, the first workshop is suitable for anyone who is interested in the film and TV industry and employability, featuring guest speaker Dr Christine Parker, feature film screenwriter, director, and academic expert on neurodiversity.

Jason Lee (CJP Lee), Professor of Film, Media and Culture and Chartered Psychologist, has been awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship (£153,000), to work with the Hollywood, UK, Bollywood film company James Bamber Productions on this project.

This higher education (HE) and industry collaboration tackles a dual need through meeting the UK film industry’s screenwriting skills gap by enabling those with mental ill-health and/or disabilities to join the field. The industry struggles to find employees who have the necessary skills in screenwriting.

This project analyses this opportunity through expanding the knowledge of mental health and disability in HE and the film industry advancing screenwriting quality and employment. Statistically, those with disabilities are the most discriminated against group in the industry. The reasons for this are addressed with solutions implemented through critical and creative outputs meeting this urgent two-fold need for equality and skills.