An International Conversation on Disabled Children’s Childhoods: Theory, Ethics and Methods

Abstract


 
 
 This article brings together members of the International Advisory Committee for the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System (IECSS) project, a longitudinal study of interactions with institutional processes when families have a young child with disabilities. The article introduces international discourses on early childhood development (both individual and community) and raises questions about the ethics of these discourses in the context of historical and current global inequalities. We consider the exporting of professional discourses from the global north to the global south through directives from global institutions, and the imposition of medical thinking onto the lives of disabled children. We discuss theoretical positions and research methods that we believe may open up possibilities for change.
 
 

A Review on Early Intervention Systems

“…Much of the research in this area focuses on mitigating sub-optimal outcomes of childhood disability and testing individual interventions in early childhood education and care. However, more recent literature on this topic recognizes disability as a complex categorization of children that includes both the impact of individual impairments and the influence of societal barriers [ 10 •]. Theoretical models of disability are rapidly changing how we think about early intervention.…”

“…Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies as a field is informed by an understanding that childhood both influences later outcomes and is a time for important experiences in the present. Further, this field critiques the focus of early intervention on rehabilitation, finding additional value in the diversity of characteristics in childhood [ 10 •, 11 , 12 •].…”

Re‐Imagining Inclusion Through the Lens of Disabled Childhoods

“…It also developed to theorize impairment and lived experiences of impairment (including painful or difficult ones; see Douglas, et al, 2020;Patsavas, 2014;Tremain, 2015), decentre Global North experiences of disability, take up provocations from decolonial, post-colonial, and Global South disability studies (Erevelles, 2011;Ineese-Nash, 2020;Nguyen, 2018;Puar, 2017); and move beyond western Enlightenment ontologies centered on a humanist perspective (as opposed to relationality or the non-human; see Braidotti, 2013;Rice et al, 2021). Disabled children's childhood studies (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2013Runswick-Cole et al, 2018) extends critical disability studies by centering the experiences and perspectives of disabled children and the role of (m)others, families, kin, and care, aspects of disability experience typically associated with the devalued feminine and missing within critical disability studies Underwood, Angarita Moreno, et al, 2020). Curran and Runswick-Cole (2014) describe the emergence of disabled children's childhood studies stemming also from childhood studies that challenge, among other things, normative assumptions of the child and human development as a universal progression toward identity with the economically productive, non-disabled, self-fashioning, autonomous individual (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2013).…”

Pandemic Effects: Ableism, Exclusion, and Procedural Bias

“…We draw on disabled children's childhood studies and international research on disability rights and inclusion (Runswick-Cole & Curran, 2013;Underwood et al, 2021) to situate our findings. Our purpose in centering disabled childhoods is to highlight how disabled children and their families are often asked to interact with many services, professionals, and procedures and therefore offer a unique standpoint from which to examine early childhood institutions.…”

“…Disability in this theoretical tradition is a sociological categorization used to organize children for the purposes of services. Disability is also a part of children's identity and a valued way in which children may understand the world (Runswick-Cole & Curran, 2013;Underwood et al, 2021).…”