Session Information
Session 9A, Young Peoples' Experience
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
13:00-14:30
Room:
Agric. G07
Chair:
Inga-Lill Jakobsson
Contribution
"To become disabled is to be relegated to a marginalised status in society and brings into high relief for the disabled person the advantages accorded those who inhabit the unacknowledged "centre". To become disabled is to lose access to these privileges and, in so doing, to begin to be defined in very different ways. These processes are subtle such that the recruitment of disabled subjects into inferior subject positions derives from the creation of identities which seem natural and very much the responsibility of the individual psyche. Although the loss of one's comparatively privileged subject position may be very sudden and momentous according to the particular nature of the accident, illness or injury, the overall summoning to a new level of identification is a gradual process whereby the doubts from within, the stares and snubs from without, and the lack of access to previously available social locations and resources erode one's prior claim to social acceptability " (Rose Calvin, 2003). Research in the Danish field of disability studies (Kjeld Høgsbro et al., 1999) embrace these problems regarding young disabled people's construction of identity. They all identify them selves in relation to the social category "disability" witch seem to be toning the social category "youth". The intersection between these two categories focuses on the process of becoming un/marked, non/privileged in relation to understand how these processes are produced, sustained and subverted (Dorthe Staunæs, 2004). The concept of intersectionality on a subject level must be followed by a majority-inclusive approach, in which social categories are not perceived as special minority issues (Dorthe Staunæs, 2004). In relation to this new research project on youth and disability (Center for små handicapgrupper, 2005), the challenge is to look into the doing of intersectionality between the two categories. That means looking into the doing of the relation between the categories, the outcome of this doing and how this doing results in troubled or untroubled subject positions (Margaret Wetherell, 1998). Focussing on the construction of un/troubled subject positions it might be interesting to see how the young people are offered subject positions in the environment to identify them selves in relation to, and how they struggle to fit into these subject positions subverting their protests. The research project wants to focus on the process of becoming a young person related to the transition from childhood to youth and from youth to adulthood, understood as a social construction where the category disability tone these transitions. The becoming of a troubled subject may be seen as a construction where the category disability has not yet toned the category youth, so this might be a place to look for different ways of understanding the identity process, which does not erode one's prior claim to social acceptability as a young person with or without disability. Keywords: Youth, disability, subject positions, intersectionality, troubling subjectivities.
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