ABSTRACT
As well as delineating the theoretical and disciplinary debates that have helped to shape this book’s intervention, the introduction also highlights the ways in which the book bears the imprint of a political and academic consciousness in the making. No longer comfortable with the labour of ‘passing as non-disabled’, my voice in this book instead foregrounds moments of ambivalence, mis-fitting (Garland-Thomson, 2011), and theoretical disjuncture, rather than concealing these. Indeed, as I argue in this introduction and throughout the book, in order to play fruitfully with the (dis)connections between what it means to exist and be formed as a psychosocial subject, and what it means to be represented as the subject of a social grouping, the foregrounding of the vulnerable self and its investments in the field of discovery is required as a kind of ethical ‘irritant’ that threatens to contaminate (liberate?) the methodology. Keeping these concerns in mind, the introduction asks: can we define ‘the disabled child’? What do we mean by ‘the child’? Is the child of this book ‘real’ or ‘figurative’ (see, Lesnik-Oberstein, 2011, 2008)? The introduction also maps key developments in disability studies, reflects on methodological considerations when working across disciplines, and explores the ethics of writing about personal experience.
