Over the past 60 years or so, research on, by, for, and with families of individuals with disabilities has greatly expanded and evolved. In both Europe and North America, much of that evolution has occurred in interaction with the emergence of disability studies as an alternative approach to thinking about the experience and meaning of disability in both a cultural and historical context.  This symposium will hear from scholars who have been active participants in using the themes and methods of disability studies to reshape our understanding of how families of children with disabilities find meaning in that experience. The papers will separately employ an emphasis on a specific region (North America, Nordic Countries, Belgium, the UK) while jointly looking at the past and future of family research in general. The first two of the papers in this symposium will give special attention to the past of family research and how it has changed over the last few decades in reaction to social advocacy and research grounded in the themes and values of Disability Studies. The last two papers will emphasize the future of family research, building on the recent contributions of scholars to provide a conceptual reframing of both interpretation and collaboration with families.  

Over the course of the four papers and the concluding discussion, the symposium will address the following set of questions and concerns:

1.      How has our understanding of families of children (and adults) with disabilities changed over the last several decades?

2.      How have those changes been influenced by the emergence of disability studies as an interdisciplinary approach?

3.      What will new concepts and approaches direct us to focus on in our research with families going forward for the next decade or so?

4.      What are the implications for reforms in how professionals interact with these families?

While each of the symposium papers will independently speak to these questions, there are common starting points that ground them all. A partial list of these points would include the following:

·         Participatory research:
Perhaps the biggest evolution in research on families has been the move to research by and with families. One of the key values of disability studies is to problematize the control of research agendas and results by academic and educational professionals. Using the expanded methodological tools, families have demanded to be heard directly, framing their experiences in their own terms, answering their own questions.

·         Contextualization:
The analysis of the social construction of disability and impairment that has been a hallmark of disability studies has encouraged a move away from understanding families’ reactions to disability in a univocal, normative manner. Talk about “the” experience of families has gradually been replaced with a growing appreciation of how contextualized and varied that experience is. Just as the meaning of disability is inevitably shaped in a socio-cultural context, so is the family interpretation of that meaning similarly influenced by specifics of time and place.

·         Intersectionality:
In the final analysis, the purpose of this symposium is to contribute to a new theoretical discourse, with its attendant methodological implications, about the intersections of disability and family with other markers of difference as located in cultural-historical spaces. The symposium focus is a timely endeavour as policies for social inclusion across nations increasingly require meaningful participation for ever more diverse populations. In such contexts, people inhabit a multiplicity of identities and the proposed symposium series will engage in an analysis of the ways in which the scholarships on difference and disability in a global world can complement one another to tackle the research, policy, and practice challenges that accompany these contemporary changes.