This book offers a unique approach to disabled children's views, articulating methodological reflections and experiences from a study conducted with children with diagnoses of autism and their parents. The reader is invited to engage with the ways children reclaim their social agency and multiple ways of knowing, being and becoming, through creative encounters where mattering and autonomy are protected.
Weaving together arts scholarship, art activism, multimodality, critical poetic narrative, and Gramsci's organic intellectualism, the book maps the oppressive systems that dehumanise and stifle disabled children's identities, reshape parenthood and obscure capabilities.
The author addresses the value of creative autonomy, affect and reflexivity in ethical research, disrupting the directive practices that pervade disabled lives. This is an urgent call to question the different ways children's freedom of expression is easily sacrificed, enmeshed in rhetoric, bureaucracy and habit.
The dialogue between the narrative and the artworks opens up diverse channels for recognition, to learn from children, to be present, resist direction, and restore our shared humanness.
Francesca Bernardi
is an independent scholar, artist and speaker. Her socially-engaged work with individuals navigating dis/ability, cultural and social exclusions, is non-hierarchical decolonial and multimodal, rooted in arts-informed methodologies, critical dis/ability studies and social pedagogy.
She is the founding chair of the Antonio Gramsci Society UK, an international forum for accessible civic engagement, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, editorial board member of Disability & Society, member of CATA-ACAT, and the Marxist Education Project.
Francesca worked as a teacher and artist-in-residence in schools, alternative provision, further education, museums and theatres. Her published work includes original research and translations as well as collaborations with TATE, the RSA, the Leverhulme Trust and universities across the UK and Ireland. She is a supervisor and lecturer in Childhood Studies at the Carnegie School of Education (Leeds Beckett University) and Visiting Scholar in Arts Therapies at the University of Roehampton, UK.
