Seminar: ‘Great Expectations’ – Child Youth & Family Disability Research Network – South West & Wales

This event (held in Cardiff) will focus on the ‘Lost voices’ of children and youth with disabilites. There will be opportunities to network with other interested people to explore ‘Great Expectations’ for disabled children and youth and listen to 2 speakers who will present their research:

Dr Aaron Prtichard from Bangor University: ‘Lost Voices? Young People with Palliative Care Needs’

Dr Kirsty Liddiard from the University of Sheffield and the Sexuality Working Alliance Group (Open University and Together for Short Lives)’:“I need privacy and respect for privacy as a sexual person”: Young People’s Voices, Sex/uality and the Palliative Care Context.

More information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/great-expectationschild-youthfamily-disability-research-network-sw-wal-tickets-15045553656?utm_campaign=new_event_email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eb_email&utm_term=eventurl_text

Centre for Comedy Studies Research (CCSR) Research Seminar Series 2014/15 ‘Comedy, Health and Disability’ – Seminar 1

To celebrate their 1^st birthday, the Centre for Comedy Studies Research (CCSR) are holding their first Comedy Matters Research Seminar for 2014-15.

Date: Wednesday 8^th October 2014

Time: 4.00pm-5.30pm with a drinks reception/birthday party 5.30pm-6.30pm

Location: Mead Room, Hamilton Centre, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH

Seminar 1 = Comedy and Mental Health Symposium

This symposium will discuss comedy and its relationship to mental health, with speakers discussing the psychology of the stand-up comedian, the use of stand-up comedy in reducing mental health stigma in the military and uses of comedy with mental health service users.

Speakers: Gordon Claridge is Emeritus Professor of Abnormal Psychology, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow, Magdalen College, and Visiting Professor, Oxford Brookes University. Professor Claridge is an internationally renowned expert in the relationship between personality and psychological disorders, adopting a broadly dimensional view. Recently, he has been involved in research on the psychology of the stand-up comedian. More generally, his research on the relationship between personality and psychological disorders has been inspired, on the practical front, by working as a clinical psychologist and, on the academic front, by experimental research on the topic. In mid-career he began to focus particularly on psychotic disorders, developing measurement scales for assessing schizotypal characteristics in the general population and using these to examine laboratory correlates in a wide range of subject samples, including relatives of psychotic patients. The central thesis in all of this work is that, while genetically predisposing to mental illness, psychotic characteristics are not in themselves pathological. On the contrary, they may have many healthy adaptive qualities, of which creativity is the most salient example.

Tim Sayers works as one of the arts in health co-ordinators at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust (LPT). He has a background in mental health nursing, specialising in working with people with severe and enduring mental health problems and also with people with drug and alcohol problems. Tim has been involved with arts in mental health on a voluntary basis for approximately fifteen years; initially as a founder member of the Brainstorm Arts in Mental Health Group in Birmingham, then as the founder member of BrightSparks: Arts in Mental Health Group in 1999. BrightSparks is dedicated to promoting positive images of mental health through the arts and has an expanding portfolio of arts projects which are mainly delivered in partnership with LPT. Tim is dedicated to using the arts, in particular comedy, to promote positive images of mental health, social inclusion, and service user and carer involvement. Tim is studying for an MSc in Recovery and Social Inclusion at Nottingham University at present, and has had articles published in his field in the past. He has extensive experience of teaching and workshop leading and is also an experienced freelance performer and workshop leader in the fields of music, poetry, comedy, magic and circus skills.

John Ryan is a stand-up comedian and one of seven co-researchers at the Department for Military Mental Health, Kings College, London, on a project that examined ‘modifying attitudes to mental health using comedy as a delivery medium’ in the armed forces. The research aimed to use comedy to help persuade military personnel to seek help with mental health issues. John is also winner of the 2011 Scottish Mental Health and Arts Film Festival Best Short Documentary Award, the 2010 NHS Regional Health and Social Care award winner for Mental Health and Well Being and in 2010 received a Royal Society for Public Health Special Commendation for contributions to the field of Arts and Health Equalities.

We are pleased to announce that we have one £40 travel grant available for a low income researcher or PhD student attending this event. Please email Simon Weaver [simon.weaver@brunel.ac.uk] by Monday 29^th September 2014 if you wish to apply.  To apply please send a short paragraph (max 250 words) explaining why you wish to attend the seminar.

For catering purposes please register at comedy.studies@brunel.ac.uk

Everyone very welcome!

For more information, please email Dr Sharon Lockyer (Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications + Director, Centre for Comedy Studies Research (CCSR), Brunel University, UK) [Sharon.Lockyer@brunel.ac.uk]

Twitter: @Comedy_Studies

Seminar: Theorising bisexuality, Dr. Surya Monro, Thursday 5th June, 1pm, Sheffield University

This event isn’t specifically addressing ‘disability’ but we thought it might be interesting to some of you:

Theorising bisexuality, Dr. Surya Monro (University of Huddersfield)

Thursday 5th June, 1pm, Boardroom, The Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS), Sheffield University

The formation of Western categories of gay/straight, and the identities politics which are predicated on this formation, have largely erased bisexuality. This erasure is evident in both scholarly and community discourses, although in recent years in the UK there have been increasingly successful attempts to include bisexuals alongside lesbians, gays and trans people under the ‘LGBT’ acronym. Whilst bisexual people have become (arguably) more socially visible, there remains a large gap in contemporary sex/gender scholarship around bisexuality. This talk aims to begin to map out the territory, building on the existing work of scholars working mostly within sociology and cultural studies. The talk discusses possible directions for analysis, including interationaism, poststructuralism, queer theory and trans theory. It suggests that a materialist analysis is important in understanding the lived experiences of bisexual people, in keeping with a broader materialist turn within the social sciences. The talk draws on empirical material from research conducted in the UK.

 

Reminder: A Week of ‘Disability’ Events (May, 2014: Sheffield, UK)

If you are in/around Sheffield next week and are into ‘disability’, you are certainly in for a treat. There are 3 events (detailed below) which might just take your fancy. Info below.

Event 1: the next (and final for this academic year) DRF seminar

Date/Time: Wednesday, 7th May 2014 (10.30am-12.30pm)

Slot 1:  Joshua Sawiuk (Univ. of Leeds, UK): The Importance of the Social Life for Disabled Students in Higher Education

Slot 2: Charlotte Jones (Univ. of Sheffield, UK): Intersex and/as Disability: Exploring the tensions between identity, medicalisation and social justice

Venue: The seminar will be held in Room 10110 (first floor) of the Arundel Building, 122 Charles Street, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB.  For a map of City Campus click here.

To offer to present in 2014-2015 seminars or for more detailed access information please contact: Rebecca Mallett: r.mallett@shu.ac.uk or 0114 225 4669 or Jenny Slater: j.slater@shu.ac.uk or 0114 225 6691.

Event 2: Symposium: Disability and Austerity: Pan-national Reflections

Date/Time: Thursday, 8^th May 2014 (2pm-5pm)

Venue: University of Sheffield – Education Building, Room 1.02.

Event 3: Gender and Disability: Asking Difficult Questions

Date: Saturday, 10^th May 2014

Venue: University of Sheffield- Humanities Research Institute (HRI), 34 Gell Street, Sheffield, S3 7QY.

Event: Sexuality Summer School 2014 (26th-30th May: Manchester, UK) @SSS_Manchester

Event: Sexuality Summer School 2014 – 3 Public Lectures (free and all welcome)

Dates: 26^th – 30th May 2014

Programme: please find detailed below.

• Monday 26 May – 12pm-2pm: Professor Jasbir Puar (Rutgers) ‘A Body with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled’

Venue: Manchester Museum, Oxford Rd, Kanaris LT (1st Floor)

In this paper Puar historically situates the most current intersectional flavors of the day, “trans” and “disabled,” through their emergence as the latest newcomers to the intersectional fray.  She looks at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs—both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements—require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning.

• Tuesday 27 May – 4pm-6pm: Professor Valerie Traub (University of Michigan and Simon Visiting Professor, Manchester) ‘Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality’

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd, University of Manchester. Sponsored by EAC, SEXGEN and Pride. Followed by wine reception at Contact Theatre.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. Tracking their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Valerie Traub speculates on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”

• Thursday 29 May – 5pm-7om: Public Lecture by Professor Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Chase Joynt (Chicago) ‘ Biopolitics Under the Skin: Relating Cancer Narratives – An Archive of the ‘Talking Dead’?’

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester. Followed by wine reception at Kro.

This talk situates the Cancer’s Margins project (www.lgbtcancer.ca) and its preliminary findings in an overview of feminist, postcolonial, and queer biopolitical scholarship. concerning anatomy, pathographies, embodiment, chronicity and new analytic modes of technomaterialism that have foregrounded and articulated complex and discontinuous assemblages that twist, warp and reimagine modernity’s bedrock binaries, including ‘alive<>dead’, ‘real <>fiction’, ‘subject<>object’, ‘now<>then’ and so on. This lecture will engage with the opportunity, and perhaps, the obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when a biopolitics of embodied humanism was organized in a relation of explicit politicization.

 

The Sexuality Summer School is sponsored this year by the Faculty of Humanities; Cornerhouse; Contact; Manchester Pride; Screen; Science, Stroke, Art 2014; and SEXGEN.

For more information about the Sexuality Summer School, including details of previous events, go to sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com, email us and get on the mailing list at sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com, find Sexuality Summer School on Facebook or tweet us @SSS_Manchester.

Reminder: Next DRF Seminar – Thurs. 13th Mar (2pm-4pm)

When: Thursday, 13th March 2014: 2pm-4pm – Arundel 10111 (SHU)

Where: Arundel Room 10111 (SHU) [the Arundel Building = 122 Charles Street, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB.  For a map of City Campus click here.]

Everyone welcome!

Slot 1: Cassie Ogden (Univ. of Chester, UK): Troubling Borders with Bodies that Seep: an critical sociological exploration into children’s experiences of leaky realities and how we can learn to accept our bodies in all its leaky glory.

Slot 2: Jenny Slater (SHU): School Toilet Chat: Exploring how Issues of Space, Access, Embodiment, Identity and ‘Normal’ Function in the the Lives of Young People

For George (2011), toilets are “the big necessity”; a mundane part of life that, until absent or inadequate, we rarely pay attention. One place these facilities are consistently found to be inadequate are in schools (Burton, 2013, Greed, 2010). Vernon, Lundblad and Hellstrom (2003) reported that 62% of boys and 35% of in the UK avoided using toilets whilst at school (citing reasons of lack of hygiene, privacy and bullying); and in 2013, a study in Scotland similarly highlighted the poor state of school toilet (Burton, 2013). Here I seek feedback on a proposal which hopes to utilise theorisations of disability, queer and fat activists and academics, to think hard about school toilets as transdisciplinary spaces to explore how issues of space, access, embodiment and normal function in the lives of young people.

 

Event explores SEND reform (May, 2014, UK)

Event: Westminster Education Forum Keynote Seminar on ‘SEND reform: Implementation, Support and Widening Provision’

with Stephen Kingdom, Deputy Director, Special Educational Needs and Disability, Department for Education

Chaired by: Robert Buckland MP, Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism

When: Morning on Thursday, 8^th May 2014         Where: Central London        This event is CPD certified

Follow on Twitter @WEdFEvents or at the Website: www.westminstereducationforum.co.uk

N.B.: there is a charge for most delegates, although concessionary and complimentary places are available (subject to terms and conditions – see below).

Description:  This timely seminar will focus on a series of reforms to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision in England set out in the Children and Families Bill, including the announcement of the new SEN reform grant to support local councils ahead of planned implementation in September 2014.  

Delegates will discuss the implications for education, health, and social care providers regarding the decision to replace the ‘statements’ system with new integrated Education, Health and Care Plans.

Further sessions will focus on support for families and the implementation by local authorities of ‘personal budgets’ to buy care and support, and the impact on providers and young people of extending support for SEND to  include 25-year-olds and those with disabilities who do not have special educational needs.

The conference will bring together key policymakers and regulatory officials with local authority representatives, school and college leaders, student support contacts in universities, health and social care professionals, parent groups, children’s charities and academics.

Overall, topics for discussion include:

• Education, Health and Care Plans: challenges for co-ordination around integrating provision;
• Personal budgets: supporting families in using their budgets, and providing for those who opt out;
• The ‘local offer’: increasing choice, awareness, and quality of provision for families with children and young people with SEND; and
• Extending provision for 25-year-olds: its impact on young people and providers of SEND support, as well as further and higher education institutions.

The draft agenda is regularly updated and the latest version is available to download here. The seminar is organised on the basis of strict impartiality by the Westminster Education Forum.

Speakers: We are delighted to be able to include in this seminar a keynote address from: Stephen Kingdom, Deputy Director, Special Educational Needs and Disability, Department for Education.

Further confirmed speakers include: Meera Craston, Director, SQW Consulting; Eirwen Grenfell-Essam, Chair, Network81; Janet Leach, Head of Service, Joint Service for Disabled Children, Enfield Council and Chair, Short Breaks Network; Andy Minnion, Director, The Rix Centre, University of East London; Peter Quinn, Vice-Chair, National Association of Disability Practitioners and Director of Student Support Services, University of York; Douglas Silas, Principal, Douglas Silas Solicitors; Dr Carol Tozer, Executive Director of Services, Scope; Nigel Utton, Headteacher, Bromstone Primary School, Kent and Chair, Heading for Inclusion and a senior speaker confirmed from Ambitious about Autism.

Additional senior participants are being approached.

Networking: This seminar will present an opportunity to engage with key policymakers and other interested parties, and is CPD certified (more details). Places have been reserved by officials from the DfE; MoJ; Office of the Children’s Commissioner and the TSol. Also due to attend are representatives from Ambitious about Autism; Beech Hill Primary School, Bedfordshire; Bromstone Primary School, Kent; Columbus School and College, Essex; Drumbeat School & ASD Service, London; Hertfordshire County Council; Integrated Services Programme; KCIL; London Borough of Camden; London Borough of Ealing; North Ridge School, Yorkshire; Shaw Trust; SQW Consulting; St Nicholas School, Essex; Stoke City Council; The Village School, London; The Walnuts School; Tribal; UK Behaviour Analysis and Research Group; University of Chichester; University of East London; Wandsworth Connexions SEN Team and Worcestershire County Council.

Overall, we expect speakers and attendees to be a senior and informed group numbering around 120, including Members of both Houses of Parliament, senior officials from the DfE, Ofsted, Ofqual and other Government departments and agencies, schools and teaching professionals, representatives of trade unions and local government, groups representing parents and students, specialist academics and charities, together with representatives of the national and trade press.

Output and About Us: A key output of the seminar will be a transcript of the proceedings, sent out around 10 working days after the event to all attendees and a wider group of Ministers and officials at DfE, HM Treasury and other government departments and agencies affected by the issues; and Parliamentarians with a special interest in these areas. It will also be made available more widely. This document will include transcripts of all speeches and questions and answers sessions from the day, along with access to PowerPoint presentations, speakers’ biographies, an attendee list, an agenda, sponsor information, as well as any subsequent press coverage of the day and any articles or comment pieces submitted by delegates. It is made available subject to strict restrictions on public use, similar to those for Select Committee Uncorrected Evidence, and is intended to provide timely information for interested parties who are unable to attend on the day.

All delegates will receive complimentary PDF copies and are invited to contribute to the content.

The Westminster Education Forum is strictly impartial and cross-party, and draws on the considerable support it receives from within Parliament and Government, and amongst the wider stakeholder community. The Forum has no policy agenda of its own. Forum events are frequently the platform for major policy statements from senior Ministers, regulators and other officials, opposition speakers and senior opinion-formers in industry and interest groups. Events regularly receive prominent coverage in the national and trade press.

Booking arrangements: To book places, please use our online booking form.

Once submitted, this will be taken as a confirmed booking and will be subject to our terms and conditions below.

Please pay in advance by credit card on 01344 864796. If advance credit card payment is not possible, please let me know and we may be able to make other arrangements.

Options and charges are as follows:

• Places at SEND reform: implementation, support and widening provision (including refreshments and PDF copy of the transcripts) are £190 plus VAT;
• Concessionary rate places for small charities, unfunded individuals and those in similar circumstances are £80 plus VAT. Please be sure to apply for this at the time of booking.

For those who cannot attend:

• Copies of the briefing document, including full transcripts of all speeches and the questions and comments sessions and further articles from interested parties, will be available approximately 10 days after the event for £95 plus VAT;
• Concessionary rate: £50 plus VAT.

If you find the charge for places a barrier to attending, please let me know as concessionary and complimentary places are made available in certain circumstances (but do be advised that this typically applies to individual service users or carers, full-time students, people between jobs or who are fully retired with no paid work, and representatives of small charities – not businesses, individuals funded by an organisation, or larger charities/not-for-profit companies). Please note terms and conditions below (including cancellation charges).

Event: Disability History Lecture (12th Dec 2013: Leuven, Belgium)

We have the pleasure to pass on an invitation to the IVth disability history lecture.

This time Josephine Hoegaerts will take you on an intriguing journey entitled: “To guard the public speaker from physical disability: Vocal practices and acoustic constructions of the able body in the long nineteenth century“. An abstract of her talk can be found below.

Mark the date: 12^th December 2013 from 16 until 18 o’clock in the heart of Leuven (Belgium).

In case you cannot attend or would like to have access to recordings of previous lectures just click on the following link: http://www.disabilityhistorylectureseries.wordpress.com

If you would like to receive some more information about this lecture or the lecture series, please do not hesitate to contact pieter.verstraete@ppw.kuleuven.be

Abstract: Disability is often conceptualized in visual terms: its historical presence is imagined as a paradoxical situation of invisibility (in the historical record, and in most historical work), and of a simultaneous conspicuousness (according to Garland-Thomson, “the history of disabled people in the world is in part the history of being on display”). Especially in the nineteenth century, the story of disability is one of increasing scrutiny as disabled people became subject to not only casual stares, but also the medical gaze and the disciplining institutional gaze. To afford these gazed upon historical actors more agency, vocal metaphors abound: researchers have strived to “give a voice” to those forgotten by conventional history, or to simply “speak up”. While analyses of the hierarchic gaze and practices of gaining voice have debunked modern notions of the disabled body, they also seem to relegate disabled agency to the voice – and therefore run the risk of buying into what Jonathan Sterne has called the ‘audiovisual litany’ in which the powerful, rational world of the eye is juxtaposed with the more somatic, emotional sound of the powerless.

In this lecture, I will try to turn the metaphoric audiovisual litany on its head by focusing on those disabilities that were only audible. Vocal impairments (such as aphasia, dysphonia and stuttering) have an ambiguous relation to the body: they only manifest themselves during the act of speaking, and are therefore necessarily ‘performative’. Through speech impediments, a more fluid notion of disability presents itself, which calls attention to the necessity and inherent danger of the constant performance of vocal ‘ability’, and also problematizes the practice of ‘speaking up’ against the (medical) gaze.

Event: Meeting the Challenge of Behaviour (Nov, 2013: Sheffield, UK)

Event: Meeting the Challenge of Behaviour

Date: Friday 8th November 2013: 9.30am – 1.00pm

Venue: Double Tree Hotel, Chesterfield Road South, Sheffield, S8 8BW

Description: This event is sponsored by the Economic & Social Research Council for the ESRC Festival of Social Science. It is hosted by The Autism Centre, Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University in partnership with Fusion Teaching School Alliance, Holgate Meadows and Heritage Park.

All welcome. This event is FREE!

Please register at http://www.shu.ac.uk/esrcfestival

Focus of the event: The problem of behaviour can often become mislocated within individual children and young people, viewed as part of their ‘condition’ rather than as a relationship issue between the young person, the people around him/her and the environments in which they are situated. Children and families become labelled as challenging and behavioural strategies can often become restrictive, punitive or exclusionary. This then threatens the inclusion agenda. The focus of this event will be to review what social science research reveals about the notion of ‘problem behaviour’ and to explore how this information can lead us to more positive and enabling strategies of support.

Speakers:

• Amanda Costello—Deputy Head at Talbot Specialist School – welcome and introductions
• Dr Nick Hodge—Reader in Education, Childhood and Inclusion – ‘What does research tell us about effective practice in meeting the challenge of behaviour?’ and discussion.
• Tony Middleton— Executive Head of Holgate Meadows and Heritage Park – ‘Working in partnership with parents and carers whose children demonstrate behaviours that challenge’ and discussion

 For more info contact: Dr Nick Hodge: n.s.hodge@shu.ac.uk

CFP: Autistic Spectrum People and Religion Research Group (ASPARRG) Seminar Day

Event: Seminar Day at University of Glasgow, UK

Date: 5th October 2013

Hosted by: Autistic Spectrum People and Religion Research Group (ASPARRG)

Brief Description: ASPARRG emerged from a joint initiative by staff at the University of Aberdeen and Cardiff University to establish an inter-disciplinary network of academics and practitioners with a common interest in the many ways in which matters of religion/spirituality and the spectrum of autism conditions may intersect. Its members come from fields as diverse as anthropology, history of religions, psychiatry, nursing and health care, practical and disability theology, ethics and ICT, literary and cultural criticism and autism research. The Group normally meets at least once a year. In 2009 a double issue of the Journal of Religion, Disability and Health, on the subject of ‘Autism and Religion’, was the first published outcome of two workshops, funded by the British Academy, during 2007-2008.

ASPARRG would welcome papers/presentations on the following topics:

• autism and religion(s)
• autism and spirituality
• autism, community and inclusion

Closing dates for abstracts (max 500 words): 20th September 2013

ASPARRG welcomes inquiries from academics or faith representatives interested in our work, and further information can be obtained by contacting the organisers.

Abstracts, booking and inquiries to: Ruth Dunster (r.dunster.1@research.gla.ac.uk) and
Christopher Barber (cfbarber@hotmail.com)