Learning Disability and Everyday Life brings into conversation ideas from social theory with “thick” descriptions of the everyday life of a middle-aged man with learning disabilities and autism.
This book is markedly ethnographic in its orientation to the gritty graininess of everyday life—eating, drinking, walking, cooking, talking, and so on—in, with, and alongside learning disability. However, preoccupation with, the “small” coexists with a gaze intent upon capturing a bigger picture, to the extent that the things constituting everyday life are deployed as prisms through and with which to critically reflect upon the wider worlds of dis/ability and everyday life. Such attention to the small and the big—the micro and the macro—allows this book to explore the ordinary and everyday ways meanings about normalcy and abnormalcy, ability and disability, are put together, enacted, practised, made (up)—in the sense of constituting and fabricating—and, crucially, accomplished through and between people in specific, and invariably contingent, sociocultural, discursive, and material conditions of possibility.
This book will be of specific interest not only to students and scholars of disability but also to persons with lived experiences of disability. This book will also be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and sociology.
Part 1: Dis/orientating directions 1. Encountering, and interpreting, everyday life in—or alongside—significant learning disability, or the world inside-out, and back-to-front 2. Dwelling, outside(r)ness, and (various) other methodological positions Part 2: Conversations about—and with (or alongside and for)—Paul and other autistic people and things 3. Authorising languages 4. Everyday discourse and everyday power 5. Tu(r)ning (in)to the things themselves Part 3: Out (of) and about place, let’s go outside 6. Becoming quixotic? A discussion on the discursive construction of disability and how this is maintained through social relations 7. Walking small with ‘Paul’: On (not) passing in purportedly public places 8. Disturbing geographies and in/stability in and around a supermarket Part 4: Inside, outside, and in/between 9. Accounting for an encounter with a social worker 10. Home, away, and the spaces, places, and persons in/between 11. A room of Paul’s own, and the apparent comfort of things Part 5: To the things themselves 12. Forms of autistic presence and practice
Alex Cockain is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Social Care and The Graduate College at Canterbury Christ Church University. Since his first book entitled Young Chinese in Urban China (2012), much of his work has focused upon issues of social inclusion and social exclusion and especially how ability and disability are made through social encounters, discourse, media representations, and everyday practices. His recent work has also explored the tactics disabled people and their families deploy to cope, and make do, with exclusionary places and practices and the ways they attempt to manage disabling social encounters.
