ABSTRACT
This chapter diverges from Chapter 1 in its approach to the question of ‘making’. Here in Chapter 2, the key concept – development – is analysed as a discursive entity. The chapter reflects on the role played by discourses of development in the life of the disabled child, highlighting and working with my own ambivalent attachment to ‘development’. I draw on the work of critical psychologist Erica Burman (2008a, 2008b), who has emphasised the relationship between development as a culturally imperialist geopolitical and economic notion, and development as a property of the child’s ‘natural’ progress in the discipline of developmental psychology. I also deploy Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the chronotope – which underscores the interconnectedness of space and time in literary expression – to interrogate the discursive construction of developmentalism. Using fictional and non-fictional examples, the chapter argues that a hegemonic developmental logic structures the decisions that are made about disabled children’s lives even when the opposite might appear to be the case. Using personal writing to reflect on my own relationship with developmental time, I begin to consider the role of the ‘pathological’ symptom in resisting the developmental unfolding of existence – a theme to which I return subsequently.
