As my explorations of futurology continued I discovered feminist futurology. Similarly to educational futurologists, feminist futurologists argue that the future has been
colonised, by Hollywood, corporations and big business. Those outside of these institutions are only encouraged to perform future thinking in terms of how will
individually fit into already established systems (Gunnarsson-Östling, 2011; Milojević, 2008). Arguments from Chapter Two resonate. Barber (2007, 36) argues that young
109 people are “permitted to choose from a menu of options offered by the world but not to alter or improve the menu or the world”. I argued in Chapter Two that some, such as disabled youth, are not even given this “paradoxical liberty” (Garland-Thomson, 2002, 24). The message delivered is: there is no place for you in this world. Asking young disabled people for their decolonising and enabling future ideas is an important pivoting point.
CDS and the new sociology of childhood both write about the colonisation of research (Shakespeare & Watson, 1999). Paradigm shifts in the disciplines have challenged disabled people’s/children’s exclusion from research, by separately repositioning both groups as social actors with experiences to share. There are examples which integrate both paradigms to include disabled children’s experiences (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2011a; Priestley, 2003; Shakespeare, 2006b; Shakespeare & Watson, 1999; Wickenden, 2010). During the 1980s disabled people in Britain, tired of being objectified through individualising research, drew on the social model of disability to devise what became known as emancipatory research. Since this time, dogmatic notions of what constitutes emancipatory research have meant it is a contested term (Barnes, 2002; Oliver, 1997). Nevertheless, disability researchers have maintained, to various degrees, that disability research should aim to include, be relevant to, and ultimately be “firmly on the side of disabled people” (Goodley & Moore, 2000, 826). Wickenden (2010) highlights that although paradigm shifts in disability research had more overtly political aims, the shift in childhood research took place over a similar period. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990) states that children have the right to be heard on issues affecting them, and this, alongside approaches from the new sociology of childhood, have led to the repositioning of children as social actors (Best, 2007; Christensen, 2004; James, 2007; Leonard, 2007; Shakespeare & Watson, 1999). Children, scholars argue, should be listened to as children, their here-and-now experiences valued, rather than considered incomplete-adults and consulted via adult gatekeepers (Burman, 2008b; Christensen, 2004; Shakespeare & Watson, 1999). These arguments resonate strongly with my thinking around youth and the way I approach research with young people.
Burman’s (2008b) work on development highlights an important link: whether relating to global systems or individual child-to-adult development, the assumption is linearity and progression. Whereas feminist futurologists question the assumption of progression in
110 terms of global futures (Milojević, 2008), those coming from the new sociology of
childhood (Christensen, 2004; James, 2007) and critical developmental psychology (Burman, 2008a) pose similar critiques around human development: arguments I have made around youth. The positioning of children as incomplete-adults means researchers have positioned them as a) too vulnerable and b) lacking in the competence to generate ‘valid’, ‘reliable’ data (Morrow & Richards, 1996). For disabled people, particularly those labelled with intellectual impairments, similar assumptions around lack of competence have been made (Bogdan & Taylor, 1994; Goodley, 2001; Oliver, 1997; Williams, 2011). The integration of CDS into the new sociology of childhood to reposition disabled children as social actors is on-going (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2011a).
Children’s inability to speak the ‘truth’ is a recurring justification excluding them from research (Morrow & Richards, 1996). Similar arguments conceptualise young people as hormone driven and overly emotional (Biklen, 2004). The gendered connotations of emotion are considered subversive; young people’s ideas and political engagement disregarded as ‘irrational’ (Jaggar, 1989). Youth are politically unreasonable;
methodologically unreliable; and unable to research rationally. I strongly dispute that children/young/disabled people are any more or less likely to tell the ‘truth’ than adults/non-disabled people. Moreover, ‘truth’ does not concern me. If reality is silence (Fuller & Loogma, 2009) and truth is dangerous (Gergen, 2008), I required a
method/ology that put fantasy on loud speaker. Feminist futurology is a useful theoretical tool in asking young disabled people about their best-ever future worlds. As well as giving feminists the ground on which to trouble the ‘violence of now’ through critiquing current patriarchy, futurology offers performative potential; space to think about the way things could be. Like youth subcultural researchers whose work I engage with in Chapter Six, methods inspired by feminist futurology help recast disabled youth’s ideas, actions and emotions as political; the heart of research question two: how can disability
researchers share the stories of young disabled people in order to reposition them as active and politically resilient?
This was summer 2011. Suddenly my reading list translated from academic to sci-fi texts to be drawn upon in research. Although there are links between futurist thinking and utopias, the two terms are not interchangeable: whereas utopian thinking is about ‘the ideal’, futurology considers possible, probable and preferable futures (Hicks, 2002). I
111 was less interested in what was possible, or probable, but keen to find out participant’s preferable futures. Although drawing on futurist thinking, therefore, I cast my research as utopian, rather than futurist. According to Geoghegan:
“…a utopian impulse or mentality [… is] grounded in the human capacity, and need, for fantasy; the perpetual conscious and unconscious rearranging of reality and one’s place in it. It is the attempt to create an environment in which one is truly at ease.”
(Geoghegan, 1987, 2)
Standing by Geoghegan’s (1987) sentiment, young people’s fantasies, emotions and desires became intrinsic to my research. A theme emerging in Chapter Seven is that young disabled people felt constrained by others low expectations of them, continually told things were not possible. Utopian fantasy allowed me to prioritise desire over any rational, logical, is it probable/possible thought; allowing disabled youth to step outside all that is reasonable, whilst engaging with research questions three and four: what can disability and the lived-experiences of young disabled people teach us about youth? What can youth and the lived-experiences of young disabled people teach us about disability? I now turn to further justify my use of the word ‘utopia’ – a word I use deliberately.