- University of Sheffield
School of Education
Room 8.05
388 Glossop Road
Sheffield S10 2JA
Telephone: +44 (0) 114 222 8185
email: d.goodley@shef.ac.uk
twitter @disabilityuos
web: https://www.shef.ac.uk/education/staff/academic/goodleyd - 0114 222 8185
Dan Goodley
The University of Sheffield, School of Education, Faculty Member
- Disability and the Family, Gilles Deleuze, Disability Studies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology of Culture, Disability Studies in Education, and 9 moreCritical Disability Studies, Disability Pedagogy, Critical Psychology, Inclusive Education, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Sciences of Education, Social Sciences, and Social Mediaedit
- Dan Goodley is a disability studies researcher with an interest in theorising and challenging disabling society.edit
... because they are located in the private domain of life.' With regard to the services provided to families with disabled babies/children, care ... 2000: 12) argues, '
count also as public virtue which should enter the... more
... because they are located in the private domain of life.' With regard to the services provided to families with disabled babies/children, care ... 2000: 12) argues, '
count also as public virtue which should enter the considerations of policy-makers.', enabling an ethics of care to ...
Research Interests: Sociology, Psychology, Narrative, Autonomy, Citizenship, and 4 moreHq, Openness to experience, H, and Rj
The paper posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on... more
The paper posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on postcolonial and critical disability theory I suggest that being human as praxis of People with Learning Disabilities is sophisticated and generative but is always enacted in a deeply disablist and ableist world. I explore being human as praxis in (i) a culture of disposability; (ii) the midst of absolute otherness and (iii) the confines of a neoliberal-ableist society. For each theme I start with a provocation, follow up with an exploration and end with a celebration (with the latter referencing the activism of people with learning disabilities). I conclude with some thoughts on simultaneously decolonising and depathologising knowledge production, the importance of recognition and writing for rather than with People with Learning Disabilities.
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This chapter will draw upon some of my recent work with colleagues in Sheffield and Manchester in Britain (www.dishuman.com) and in response to some inspiring writers and writings. Drawing on research projects and intellectual moments of... more
This chapter will draw upon some of my recent work with colleagues in Sheffield and Manchester in Britain (www.dishuman.com) and in response to some inspiring writers and writings. Drawing on research projects and intellectual moments of engagement, the chapter considers the ways in which disability disavows normative constructions of the human. I use the term disavowal in its original psychoanalytic sense of the word: to simultaneously and ambivalently desire and reject something (in this case, the human). I will then clarify and expand upon this disavowal—with explicit reference to the politics of people with intellectual disabilities (Throughout the chapter I will use interchangeably the terms “learning disability” and “intellectual disability” to acknowledge the ways in which their different usage reflects different national contexts. Learning disability is preferred in Britain whereas intellectual disability is used in Australia and the USA)—and make a case for the ways in which the human is (1) a category through which social recognition can be gained and (2) a classification requiring expansion, extension, and disruption. Indeed, an under-girding contention of this chapter is that people with intellectual disabilities are already engaged in what we might term a post-human politics from which all kinds of human can learn. The chapter outlines seven reasons why we should ask what it means to be human. Then we will move to focus on four very human elements—support, frailty, capacity, and desire—and disability’s place in redefining these elements.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a composite framework for critical policy analysis drawing from discourse analysis and post-structuralist analysis. Drawing on an interpretive paradigm (Yanow, 2014), this paper provides a... more
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a composite framework for critical policy analysis drawing from discourse analysis and post-structuralist analysis. Drawing on an interpretive paradigm (Yanow, 2014), this paper provides a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the processes involved in the application of these tools in a critical policy analysis project, focusing on disability policy within the Irish context. Methodologically, this is a resourceful cross-fertilization of analytical tools to interrogate policy, highlighting its potential within critical disability policy analysis and beyond. Design/methodology/approach Merging a critical discourse analysis framework and a policy problematization approach, the combination of tools presented here, along with their associated processes, is referred to as the critical discourse problematization framework. Findings Potentially, the framework can also be employed across a number of cognate social policy fields including educati...
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Why theory? It is a question the Greeks would probably not have asked. Theoria for our classical cousins was about ‘contemplation’, reflecting on observation and experience, in other words, ways of making sense of the world, reaching out... more
Why theory? It is a question the Greeks would probably not have asked. Theoria for our classical cousins was about ‘contemplation’, reflecting on observation and experience, in other words, ways of making sense of the world, reaching out through reason to the juicy fruit of truth. It was built in to what they did and how they approached the world. A gymnasium was both a place for getting naked and for philosophical speculation, a combination of the intellectual and the physical, incongruous in the modern academy where thinking is wrapped in robes and gowns. Nietzsche, in marked contrast to his fellow philosophers down the ages, taught that while our ideas did not serve the untouchable tribunal of truth, theory was a psychological necessity, an outcome of the need for human actors to impose intellectual order on a chaotic world. ‘The categories are “truths”’, he wrote, ‘only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 516). Foucault summed up this insight with his aphorism, ‘the will to truth’. We do not discover truth; we work it up into an episteme — a collection of ideas that makes most of us nod with approval. Theory has a reputation for being esoteric but as it settles into everyday discourse, into habit, it transforms into common sense. Nietzsche’s perspectivism might debunk truth, but it does not question the need for theory.
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Hegemonic constructions of masculinity constitute men as the quintessential neoliberal citizen: able, autonomous, in control, independent and rational. While masculinity studies have challenged such narrow expressions, disability remains... more
Hegemonic constructions of masculinity constitute men as the quintessential neoliberal citizen: able, autonomous, in control, independent and rational. While masculinity studies have challenged such narrow expressions, disability remains largely ignored. Too often, disability is viewed as undoing the very processes associated with masculinity. To be disabled a man is to occupy a bifurcated societal position. Nevertheless, recent developments in critical disability studies have drawn attention to the ways in which disability expands identities beyond their usual negative constitution. In this chapter, we will draw on a qualitative research project to explore the ways in which disability crips1 masculinity research in affirmative and exciting ways. We see our task as wheeling back from the doings of qualitative research in order to expose the complexities and possibilities offered by disabled masculinities. We suggest that disability extends critical masculinity studies’ possibilities for such transgressive research encounters.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Psychology, Education, Discourse, Politics, and 3 moreMaterialism, Vulnerability, and Subjectivity
This chapter explores the potential of drawing on psychoanalytic ideas to analyse disabling culture, to make sense of the influence of culture on subjectivities and to unleash possibilities for individual and collective resistance on the... more
This chapter explores the potential of drawing on psychoanalytic ideas to analyse disabling culture, to make sense of the influence of culture on subjectivities and to unleash possibilities for individual and collective resistance on the part of non/disabled people. The chapter introduces psychoanalysis as an enlightenment project that has informed cultural understandings of the psyche and subjectivity. To analyse psychoanalytic culture we will explore the approach of Lacanian psychoanalysis with a view to understanding the imaginary and symbolic elements of culture. Our intentions will become more specific as we analyse the precarious cultural foundations of ableist society and consider the ways in which disabled people come to occupy a prominent position of disavowal through which the processes of ableism can seep into everyday subjectivities. Simultaneously, possibilities for resistance will be identified, to challenge the cultural violence of ableism. We will then consider the chapter by the renowned British disability activist Paul Hunt, ‘A Critical Condition’, in the acclaimed book that he edited entitled Stigma (1966), and suggest that while this text has been held up as an exemplary critique of the sociopolitical conditions of disablism, it also bears the marks of a piece of critical psychoanalytic analysis, which identifies lack and possibility. Psychoanalytic culture
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Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging... more
Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging insights, including theorizing through materialism, bodies that matter, inter/trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and Other. I briefly disentangle these themes and suggest that while we may well start with disability, we often never end with it as we engage with other transformative arenas including feminist, critical race and queer theories. Yet critical disability studies reminds us of the centrality of disability when we consider the politics of life itself. In this sense, then, disability becomes entangled with other forms of oppression and revolutionary responses.
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What do disability labels give us and what do they steal from us? How possible is it to live our lives without categories when life is necessarily categorical? In this brief provocation, I want to explore the disability labels through... more
What do disability labels give us and what do they steal from us? How possible is it to live our lives without categories when life is necessarily categorical? In this brief provocation, I want to explore the disability labels through recourse to three perspectives that have much to say about categorization, disability, and the human condition: the biopsychological, the biopolitical, and, what I term, an in-between-all politics. It is my view that disability categories intervene in the world in some complex and often contradictory ways. One way of living with contradictions is to work across disciplinary boundaries, thus situating ourselves across divides and embracing uncertainty and contradiction to enhance all our lives. I will conclude with some interdisciplinary thoughts for the field of adapted physical activity.
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This paper provides a speculative, conceptual and literature-based review of the relationship between disability and new technologies with a specific focus on inclusive education for disabled people. The first section critically explores... more
This paper provides a speculative, conceptual and literature-based review of the relationship between disability and new technologies with a specific focus on inclusive education for disabled people. The first section critically explores disability and new technologies in a time of Industry 4.0. We lay out some concerns that we have, especially in relation to disabled people’s peripheral positionality, when it comes to these new developments. The second section focuses on the area of inclusive education. Inclusion and education are oftentimes in conflict with one another. We tease out these conflicts and argue that we cannot decouple the promise of new technologies from the challenges of inclusive education, because, in spite of the potential for technological mediation to broaden access to education, there remains deep-rooted problems with exclusion. The third section of our paper explores affirmative possibilities in relation to the interactions between disability and new technolo...
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In what ways does a consideration of the politics of dis/ability permit a rethink of community membership, participation and engagement with civil society? What are the implications for the daily lives of dis/abled people, their families... more
In what ways does a consideration of the politics of dis/ability permit a rethink of community membership, participation and engagement with civil society? What are the implications for the daily lives of dis/abled people, their families and their supporters? How might dis/ability permit us to (re)think political agitation, community identity and everyday activism? Concurrently, we are working with a number of civil society partners who are disrupting normative notions of what civil society means. In this chapter, we start by examining the nature of civil society after it has been touched by the processes associated with neoliberal capitalism. We then start to explore some affirmative and resistant possibilities offered by civil society in these dangerous times. Our search leads us, inevitably, to the politics of dis/ability and the potential of dis/ability to rethink the workings of civil society as a DisHuman project (Goodley D, Runswick-Cole K, Discourse Stud Cult Pol Educ. Online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.930021, 2014). We conclude by arguing that any consideration of civil society has to ask questions about the kinds of human beings that are valued at the heart of this civility. Dis/ability is the space through which to rethink the human, the civil and society.
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This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education,... more
This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education, we are mindful of the significance of social theory and its relationship with articulations of social justice. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought we grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. We focus in on the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial and critical disability studies. Our argument considers the problem of humanism (as a product of colonial Western imaginaries), the critical responses offered by posthuman thinking and then seeks to rearticulate forms of new humanism that are respons...
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This is a chapter concerned with disability politics, interested in the possible offerings of critical psychology and engaged with a project questioning what it means to be a human being. When disability is defined as a problem and when... more
This is a chapter concerned with disability politics, interested in the possible offerings of critical psychology and engaged with a project questioning what it means to be a human being. When disability is defined as a problem and when that problem is located in an individual’s body or mind, then there is only really one way we can go with disability and that is pathologisation. We know from our critical psychology colleagues—many of who are represented in this volume of work—that a discipline that individualises human diversity as human trouble will only ever exist as an antithetical community to that of disability activism. The latter, a community in which we locate ourselves, seeks not only to challenge pathologising accounts of disability but also to open up a discussion about the possibilities for human capital offered by disability.
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We know from recent research that disabled children, their families and other allies are subjected to a whole host of responses from people, organizations and systems in society. What we perhaps know less about are the reasons why ‘the... more
We know from recent research that disabled children, their families and other allies are subjected to a whole host of responses from people, organizations and systems in society. What we perhaps know less about are the reasons why ‘the non-disabled’ or ‘normative’ imaginary responds to disability in terms of the often contradictory processes of fear/fascination; attraction/repulsion; recognition/extermination. Genetics, medicine and clinical psychology formally capture this ambivalent response to childhood disability — recruiting bodies and minds into the psycho-biological register in order to recognize them as disorders while, simultaneously, threatening to erase these bodies/minds as deficient kinds of humanity. Just as important are those informal moments that disabled people experience every day, in mundane and recurring encounters with what we might call the normative imaginary. In this chapter we want to explore this imaginary through the stories of disabled people. Adopting a social psychoanalytic account, we will consider the ways in which disability becomes wrapped up in responses of the non-disabled. We will make, employ and evaluate the concepts of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘disavowal’, and consider them in light of stories shared with one of us (Dan). Finally, we will conclude with some thoughts on cure, rehabilitation and therapy for the non-disabled — those poor souls caught up in the normative imaginary — albeit with tongue in cheek.
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In this chapter, we develop and draw on an emerging approach – which we entitle the DisHuman – to explore how disabled children’s lives are enabled and limited by their construction as simultaneously both ‘different from’ and ‘the same... more
In this chapter, we develop and draw on an emerging approach – which we entitle the DisHuman – to explore how disabled children’s lives are enabled and limited by their construction as simultaneously both ‘different from’ and ‘the same as’ other children. One institutional setting in which the child becomes known in their relationship with the dis/ability complex is the school.
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In order for narrative research or disability research per se to enable, it must ready to conceptualise the complex terrains of knowledge and activism. Narrative research has to work alongside disabled people, their allies, their... more
In order for narrative research or disability research per se to enable, it must ready to conceptualise the complex terrains of knowledge and activism. Narrative research has to work alongside disabled people, their allies, their practices, their resistances and their theorising. This paper ...
... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Book; Authored Book]. Qualitative methods in psychology: A research guide. Banister, Peter; Burman, Erica; Parker, Ian; Taylor, Maye; Tindall, Carol. Maidenhead, BRK,... more
... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Book; Authored Book]. Qualitative methods in psychology: A research guide. Banister, Peter; Burman, Erica; Parker, Ian; Taylor, Maye; Tindall, Carol. Maidenhead, BRK, England: Open University Press. (1994). ...
In this paper, we consider the relationship between the human and disability; with specific focus on the lives of disabled children and young people. We begin with an analysis of the close relationship between ‘the disabled’ and ‘the... more
In this paper, we consider the relationship between the human and disability; with specific focus on the lives of disabled children and young people. We begin with an analysis of the close relationship between ‘the disabled’ and ‘the freak’. We demonstrate that the historical markings of disability as object of curiosity and register of fear serve to render disabled children as non-human and monstrous. We then consider how the human has been constituted, particularly in the periods of modernity and the rise of capitalism, reliant upon the naming of disability as antithetical to all that counts as human. In order to find a place for disabled children in a social and cultural context that has historically denied their humanity and cast them as monstrous others, we develop the theoretical notion of the DisHuman: a bifurcated complex that allows us recognise their humanity whilst also celebrating the ways in which disabled children reframe what it means to be human. We suggest that the lives of disabled children and young people demand us to think in ways that affirm the inherent humanness in their lives but also allow us to consider their disruptive potential: this is our DisHuman child. We draw on our research projects to explore three sites where the DisHuman child emerges in moments where sameness and difference, monstrosity/disability and humanity are invoked simultaneously. We explore three locations – (i) DisDevelopment; (ii) DisFamily and (iii) DisSexuality – illuminating the ways in which the DisHuman child seeks nuanced, politicized and complicating forms of humanity.