Interrogating Inclusion: Critical Research with Disabled Youth who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Abstract

This dissertation provides a critical exploration of the notion of inclusion, applied to the ‘case’ of disabled youth who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Oriented by Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this study examined the lives and practices of youth who use AAC to better understand how they make ‘practical sense’ of inclusion and locate their place in the world. The objective was to illuminate the extent to which the constraints of social arrangements and conditions delimited the social interactions of youth who use AAC and shaped their understandings of inclusion. Using a novel critical dialogical methodology developed for the study, data were generated with 13 Canadian youth who use AAC by combining participant-generated photographs and a graphic elicitation technique termed Belonging Circles with interviews and observations. The study results make three substantive contributions to existing research on disabled children’s lives and children’s rehabilitation. First, the participants’ narratives reflected habitus - socially constituted sets of dispositions - that predisposed them to accommodate the devalued social positions and constricted conditions of existence imposed on them. From the points of view made possible to them, the youths’ practices represent logical and practical strategies for claiming inclusion that, paradoxically, reproduce and resist the systems of categorization that constrain them. Second, by illuminating the life circumstances and delimited life trajectories of youth in the study, the research vividly demonstrates that some forms of ‘inclusion’ perpetuate symbolic violence by keeping disabled youth ‘in their place’ through the oppressive effects of misrecognised social norms, beliefs and values that privilege ‘normal’ bodies. All study participants claimed inclusion but under constricted conditions of possibility that were not of their choosing. Finally, while the youths’ practices primarily reproduced the status quo, they also worked at the margins to curate locally produced forms of inclusion that attempted to transform the ‘rules of the game’. These results make visible the mechanisms involved in reproducing significant social inequities which constrain youth who use AAC. The research suggests a need for systemic shifts past reified notions of inclusion toward fostering social spaces where alternative ways of being in the world are positively valued.