Comment from the Field

Abstract

Between December 2013 and July 2014, Liverpool Hope University hosted the first part of a seminar series from the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS).1 series was organized and chaired by Director of the CCDS, Dr David Bolt. While diverse in style, topic, and content, the seven presentations all underscored the value in disabled peoples' lives, writing, and various forms of life-writing. Through the seminars and examples of such lives, writings, and lifewritings, participants were encouraged to attend to the polyphonic of disability.Marie Caslin's seminar, entitled The Reality and Rhetoric of Pupil Voice, considered the power imbalances within pupil-voice research. Drawn from her doctoral research, the session provided an overview of a study that aimed to develop innovative, exploratory research strategies for harnessing pupil among children who have received the BESD label. Despite the challenges of such research, Dr Caslin's work demonstrated that in order to uncover the antecedents of so-called Behavioural, Emotional, and Social Difficulties we have to talk to the labelled young people themselves. Dr Caslin concluded that attending to pupil emphasizes a perspective that encourages us to look beyond blaming the individual challenging or difficult pupil, pupils who are often condemned to voicelessness, and hence powerlessness, once characterized as disturbed, irrational, and so unworthy of consultation about what is in their own best interests.Claire Penketh's seminar went beyond reporting and brought the voices and bodies of young disabled people into the room. seminar, DaDa: Evaluating Participation in the Arts, gave an account of participatory evaluative research carried out by members of Young DaDa and undergraduate students from Liverpool Hope University. Young DaDa is a Liverpool-based organization developed to encourage participation in the arts by Deaf and disabled young people. evaluation project was designed to enable us all to learn about the practice of using participatory methods and the ways in which the arts can enable participation. In this case, voice took many forms as evaluation methods evolved into drawing, song, and role-play, with Dr Penketh relinquishing control so that the young people could sing their evaluation.Deafness and participation in the arts also figured in Michael Davidson's seminar, Cleavings: Critical Losses and Deaf Gain. Prof. Davidson began by observing how many of Emily Dickinson's best-known poems deal with the of sight, based on her own experiences with temporary blindness in the mid-1860s, but that they are less about the absence of sight than about how she experiences the limits of consciousness. Using poems by Dickinson as well as signed and embodied interpretations of poetry, together with recent work in cultural and queer theory, Prof. Davidson then explored the fine line between and loss in disability studies. Using his experience of sudden hearing loss, and referencing Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's work on disability gain, Prof. Davidson argued that although recent claims for gain have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness, a more critical understanding is needed of the seldom-acknowledged losses, frustrations, and failures experienced by deaf and hard-of-hearing people.Poetry featured again in Cath Nichols's seminar, Creative/Critical Research: Poem Sequence Phantom/Sex Ontology. Through her research-as-writing approach, Dr Nichols analysed a sequence of part-memoir, part-metaphysical poems that explore proprioceptive feelings which question our understandings of sex/gender. narrative thread of the sequence hinges around a doctor refusing to help a girl with a sex-change intervention, saying it would be cutting off the legs of a cripple, and the girl responding with No, it would be like giving me wheels. This was a sensitive and powerful presentation that delineated intersections of trans- and disabled experience: representations characterized by fear and horror; medical issues; social and cultural (in-) visibility, and particularly proprioception and the phantom body. …