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Troubling school toilets: resisting discourses of ‘development’ through a critical disability studies and critical psychology lens

SLATER, Jen
JONES, Charlotte
PROCTER, Lisa
2017

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This paper interrogates how school toilets and ‘school readiness’ are used to assess children against developmental milestones. Such developmental norms both inform school toilet design and practice, and perpetuate normative discourses of childhood as middle-class, white, ‘able’, heteronormative, cissexist and inferior to adulthood. Critical psychology and critical disability studies frame our analysis of conversations from online practitioner forums. We show that school toilets and the norms and ideals of ‘toilet training’ act as one device for Othering those who do not fit into normative Western discourses of ‘childhood’. Furthermore, these idealised discourses of ‘childhood’ reify classed, racialised, gendered and dis/ablist binaries of good/bad parenting. We conclude by suggesting new methodological approaches to school toilet research which resist perpetuating developmental assumptions and prescriptions. In doing this, the paper is the first to explicitly bring school toilet research into the realms of critical psychology and critical disability studies.

Dis/ability and austerity: beyond work and slow death

GOODLEY, Dan
LAWTHOM, Rebecca
RUNSWICK-COLE, Katherine
2014

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The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased preca- rity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics.

FINAL REPORT - Life as a disabled child : a qualitative study of young people’s experiences and perspectives

SHAKESPEARE, Tom
et al
March 2005

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This report documents the results of a project to explore disabled children’s (11 – 16 years old) experiences, and their perceptions of impairment; of services; and of their social relationships with family, peers and professionals. The study involved over 300 children in a range of settings and used qualitative methods.
The research highlighted an atmosphere of resentment towards the comparatively high levels of adult surveillance disabled children faced, as opposed to their non-disabled peers, along with the varying degrees to which the word ‘disabled’ and the concept of disability had been appropriated and understood by disabled children themselves. Finally, it alluded to the presence of multiple barriers to inclusion (as generally understood by the social model) that disabled children were still facing on a regular basis

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