Learning Disability and Everyday Life brings into conversation ideas from social theory with "thick" descriptions of the everyday life of a middle-aged man with learning disabilities and autism.

This book is markedly ethnographic in its orientation to the gritty graininess of everyday life-eating, drinking, walking, cooking, talking, and so on-in, with, and alongside learning disability. However, preoccupation with, the "small" coexists with a gaze intent upon capturing a bigger picture, to the extent that the things constituting everyday life are deployed as prisms through and with which to critically reflect upon the wider worlds of dis/ability and everyday life. Such attention to the small and the big-the micro and the macro-allows this book to explore the ordinary and everyday ways meanings about normalcy and abnormalcy, ability and disability, are put together, enacted, practised, made (up)-in the sense of constituting and fabricating-and, crucially, accomplished through and between people in specific, and invariably contingent, sociocultural, discursive, and material conditions of possibility.

This book will be of specific interest not only to students and scholars of disability but also to persons with lived experiences of disability. This book will also be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and sociology.

About the Author

Alex Cockain is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Social Care and The Graduate College at Canterbury Christ Church University. Since his first book entitled Young Chinese in Urban China (2012), much of his work has focused upon issues of social inclusion and social exclusion and especially how ability and disability are made through social encounters, discourse, media representations, and everyday practices. His recent work has also explored the tactics disabled people and their families deploy to cope, and make do, with exclusionary places and practices and the ways they attempt to manage disabling social encounters.

Reviews

"Learning Disability and Everyday Life concerns autism, but the word does not appear in the book title. There is a reason for that, as it becomes clear by reading. Alex Cockain is critical towards pre-given categories; he is aware of the power of language, and he tries to open a narrative space of encounter challenging the assumptions, postures and stereotypes which accompany autistic and disabled persons. Of course, as the Author discusses with much reflexivity, there are limits in his strategy, as with every experiment. Still, it poses a problem, challenges conventions, and allows reconfiguration and renegotiation. So, the title refers to 'learning disability', together with 'everyday life'. On the one hand, focusing on the rhythms and practices of the everyday means paying attention to the scrutiny of the small and the ordinary, including practices like eating, walking or sleeping. But clearly, the small and the ordinary are not meaningless; quite the contrary, the everyday is political and allows access to the broader world of disability."

Alberto Vanolo (12 Aug 2024): Learning Disability and Everyday Life, Disability & Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2024.2391612

Book Information
ISBN 9781032018249
Author Alex Cockain
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 700g