Young Lives at the Margins-Online Symposium

Description

Conference Abstract:
Dis/locating Imagined Futures: The Disabled habitus in alternative educational provision
This paper draws from an ethnographic study of a group of young disabled students within one Further Education (FE) College in England. Their inclusions in to FE were tied to a number of complex interactions between the people who exist there and reforms to FE systems, which aim to support a student’s capacity to offer entrepreneurial performances. Central to these reforms is alternative provision (AP), which offer places to young disabled people who have been excluded from school, and who risk failing to invest in the work-related skills and knowledge that apparently has measurable consequences for future earnings and social justice. This paper shows how the inclusion of young disabled people in to a college community has unintended effects and consequences, and how the habitus shapes their ability to accrue valuable forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986) from which to develop ‘performative visions’ of the future (Bourdieu 1990). An emancipatory, qualitative methodology was used to gather data. In their own words, young disabled people question the sense of optimism attributed to AP and the extent to which their existences in FE has overcome the social barriers and closed networks that can be associated with disabled people as a marginalised group. To harness such existences, and to develop emerging theoretical ideas of habitus of disability, my conclusions set out young disabled peoples’ negotiations of a college as an ethical project in which everyone - college students and teaching staff - have work to do on themselves. This makes AP not something that is done to young disabled people, but a project for which everyone is responsible. This paper, therefore, re-reads the story of AP with a wary eye, and views disability as being entwined with, and entwines, other aspects of social difference in ways that promote new and existing forms of social exclusion (Johnston and Bradford 2019). In doing so, the research confronts the positive underpinnings of AP in the current debate about school exclusions within England.

Period	18 Jun 2020
Held at	St Mary's University , United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International