Young people's embodied social capital and performing disability

Abstract

This paper teases out how the identities of young people with mind-body-emotional differences are performed and constructed via their social relationships primarily within school spaces. Drawing upon the concept of embodied social capital (Holt, 2008), the paper explores empirically how young people's positioning within a variety of social networks (re)produces differentially valued identity positionings which can become embodied within young people's shifting senses of self.

Disabilities, urban natures and children’s outdoor play

“…As in previous studies, the 'judgemental', 'not understanding', 'uneducated' attitudes of other parents/carers towards the disabled children's diverse playing/performative styles were most frequently highlighted. As in work by Ryan (2008) andHolt (2010), it was evident that taken-for-granted norms of 'proper' conduct in nature/play-spaces were profoundly unsettled by the diverse, characteristic voices, behaviours, and bodily comportments of disabled children (manifest, for example, in many instances where other play-space users had reportedly been 'awkward', 'unhappy' or 'spooked' by children's conditionally characteristic ways of walking, wheeling, tottering, shouting, staring, laughing, dribbling, burping, bumping or clinging).…”

“…As in work by Holt (2010) and Ryan (2010), microgeographies of embarrassments, tuts, looks (or looks away) and gossip were described as some tangible manifestations of intractable normative ableisms -or their experience of 'not living up to' an 'ideal' -in relation to parenting and behaviour in public spaces.…”

“…For Holt, embodied social capital directs attention to ways in which "powerful norms and values are embedded in everyday practices within specific social networks" (2010, p.26), particularly how disable-ist socialspatial exclusions, discourses and identities are embedded in, and (re)constituted through, habitual, everyday practices (2004). Holt (2003Holt ( , 2010 notes how plural social geographies of disabilities intersect with contemporary identities, inequalities and discourses (e.g. in terms of age, gender, social class, ethnicity and parenting cultures), and how many of these intersections are 'off the radar' in social-scientific accounts of disability.…”

“…However, it is instructive to note that parents'/carers' accounts typically described multiple forms of barrier together, via quickfire narrative combinations evoking the specific, complex, co-occurring, coconstitutive features (see Holt, 2003Holt, , 2004Holt, , 2010) of the two sites. "There's so much rubbish and dog mess everywhere and the environment isn't very safe.…”

“…Specifically, building upon recent conceptualisations of everyday, social-material, emotional-affective (Holt, 2010, Holt, et al, 2013 and "small, almost unremarkable" (Ryan, 2005(Ryan, , p.73, 2008 geographies of disabilities, I highlight four key complications. First, I present an overview of the multiple, compound social-material 'barriers' reported by parents/carers in recalling visits to the two outdoor play-spaces.…”