Comment from the Field

Abstract

Organized by Katherine Runswick-Cole, Senior Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, this symposium took place in February 2016. Hosted by newly established Critical & Community Psychology Research Group, Research Centre for Social Change: Community Wellbeing event brought together a cohort of scholars working at cutting edge of disability studies. Exploring, challenging, and breaking free from rigid understandings of what it means to be human, day's speakers invited us to resist myth of normality.Dr Kirsty Liddiard opened symposium with a talk entitled What's Love Got to Do with It? Austerity, Intimacy and Humanity. Opening her discussion, she postulated that assumptions of intimate have been culturally invigorated to inform a contracted aesthetics of body. Deconstructing the intimate politics of austerity through politicized lens of a well-known Tory story, she exposed recent policy initiatives as predicated upon ableist assumptions. These ableist assumptions ultimately govern right way that bodies and minds must be intimate. Among others, Dr Liddiard gave example of bedroom tax to explicate more clearly how a Tory story seeks to denigrate disabled bodies. Introduced in 2012, bedroom tax designates a limited physical space within which bodies are expected to remain. Bodies that do not comply are dehumanized by humiliating and derogative assumption that disabled bodies take up too much space-a space that disrupts and unsettles cultural delineation of appropriate intimacy. To this end, Dr Liddiard pointed out that home is no longer a space of ultimate and private intimacy, but a politically contaminated space targeted by welfare cuts. Making reference to a discussion that unfolded later in day, she presented to audience dis/humanity as an ideological movement to trouble and re-fashion liberal citizenship (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 4). This disruption, she suggested, is vital to accessing new creativities of dis/ human narratives.Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole delivered a paper titled Disability, Childhood and Human: Refusing Monstrosity. Reflecting back to a cultural history that connected disabled children to perceptions of monstrosity, she drew upon vandalism of synonymizing children with unpredictability, curiosity, and fear (de Montaigne). By outlining historical dehumanization of disabled children, need to challenge cultural constructs of normality is made prominent. Here, Dr Runswick-Cole departs slightly from previous attempts to expand narrow construct of normal. Indeed, she suggested that such a process will expand to include some while continuing to exclude others. What is necessary, then, is not an expansion of cultural category of normality, but disruption of its very existence. Explicating a critical disruption, she explored dis/human. Such a framing demands a consideration of sameness and difference simultaneously. As noted by audience, this may perpetuate tensions, conflicts, and complexities of disability within an ableist world. Yet, Dr Runswick-Cole justified dis/human logic by outlining how encounters with an ableist world are not simple. Rather, they are often uncomfortable, awkward, and ambiguous. By recognizing this uncertainty, we can begin to think of new ways to affirm diversity. Disability is presented as an opportunity to transcend boundaries of humanity, personal, self, and Other. Such thinking brings disability studies to forefront of criticality, to develop a theory which both troubles and reshapes human using crip ambitions, while also asserting humanity of disabled people, termed by Dr RunswickCole as normative desires (Goodley and Runswick-Cole).Bringing an anthropological trajectory to day, Phil Bayliss's talk, Carpetbaggers, Jaguars and Vultures: Perspectivism in a Neoliberal Universe, further elaborated on consequences of neoliberalism. …