ABSTRACT
Until the 2000s, the issue of youth and disability had commonly been dealt with in two very much separate literatures. Youth and youth studies literature had until that point tended to assume a non-disabled, normate theoretical unit, albeit often with a core focus on other very real exclusions which intersect with disability exclusions – class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Coffield and Gofton, 1994; MacDonald, 1997; Willis, 1977). Meanwhile, disabled young people have until recently been the subject of a clinical or therapeutic gaze (Brisenden, 1986; Royal College of Physicians, 1986; Thomas et al., 1991) or have been framed within disability research as a separate social group subject to fractured transitions (Beresford, 2004; Wehman, 2006). Institutionalisation, special schooling, Young Disabled People’s Units, day centres and exclusions from transition services has helped cement this parallel set of experiences and sociological analyses (Barnes, 1991; Roulstone and Prideaux, 2012). The relative absence of disabled young people from the mainstream youth literature and from much of disability studies is in part explicable in terms of their absence from the core domains of transitions, education, employment and identity which feature in both (Côté, 2014; Wyn and Cahill, 2015). Eventual attempts to connect youth with disability have tended to frame their analyses in terms of barriers to a productive life (Beresford, 2004; Burchardt, 2005; Clark and Hirst, 1989; Riddell, 2009; Roulstone and Yates, 2009). Indeed these issues are very real, especially for people with learning difficulties navigating a ‘learning society’, one requiring perpetual selfreinvestment (Riddell et al., 2001). However, such work often reinforces the assumption of disabled young people as non-citizens, rather than reframing debates. There are a few exceptions; Swain and French’s work on disabled young people explores activist and political identities well beyond a productivist model (Swain and French in Roche, 2004). Morris’s work explores both economic but also wider participation and identity inclusions/exclusions for disabled young people (Morris, 1999, 2001). In the case of both youth studies and disability studies, the image of a sick or disabled young person has mapped excluded identities, but assumed aspirations to mainstream cultural and economic goals (Roulstone and Yates, 2009; Yates and Roulstone, 2013). However, more recent work has highlighted online identities (Söderström, 2009), disabled gun gang identity (Devlieger et al., 2007) and arts-based identities for disabled young people (Taylor, 2005) some distance from the image of workless and aimless populations. These developments rightly trouble our sense of just what the study of disability and youth
should be. Put simply, even disability studies has had a tendency to productivist, malestream, white and shadowing narratives1 about disabled young people. The notion that disabled young people can have significant lives beyond formal education and work was first mooted by the Warnock report (Warnock Committee, 1978). Recent ideas that disabled people contribute to social and economic wellbeing through employing personal assistants (PAs), volunteering, environmental access campaigning and activism are slowly beginning to be acknowledged at least academically (Prideaux et al., 2009). The notion that social life can be valued beyond paid work continues to receive academic attention (Grover and Piggott, 2015). Having said that, although productivist analyses can detract from wider analyses, we do know that many sick and disabled young people are facing unprecedented pressure from welfare systems across the Western world to engage with paid work, training and further education. The deep paradox here is that we’re seeing a redoubled and aggressive attempt to activate disabled young people to engage with the very systems that have historically been so effective in excluding them (Deacon and Patrick, 2011; Etherington and Ingold, 2012; Grover and Soldatic, 2013). However these are paramount systems that continue to define and gatekeep wider access to citizenship and have to be accounted for. The following then will begin by looking at the ‘crisis’ of young disabled people. It will then explore the changing discourses of exclusion and examine the specific barriers and levers to education and paid employment – two key passports to economic citizenship. Disability diversity is then explored in a way that cautions against a forced homogenisation of ‘disabled youth’. The chapter will round off with a more pluralistic picture of disabled young people’s lives, one which argues for a reframing of ‘good lives’ for disabled young adults. The focus will be largely on the UK, but international insights will be gleaned to place those insights into a wider context.
