Political Love and SpaceTime Disturbances: Reimagining Parenting and Disabled Childhoods Beyond Neoliberal and Developmental Discourses

This thesis makes trouble for the ways in which the dominant discourses of neoliberal-ableism and psy-developmentalism shape the lives of four parents of disabled children. These discourses are critiqued in the context of the ongoing social injustices that they relationally produce by virtue of Othering against an idealised neoliberal-ableist ‘self’. Unilinear developmental trajectories and expectations are troubled for the ways in which they deny the lively non-linear temporalities disabled children intra-actively produce.

Through engagement with an agential realist framework and dishuman theorising a theoretical space is opened from which new generative stories of possibilities beyond dominant discourses can enfold dynamically with the world. Agential realism entangles as a framework to understanding knowing from within, as an ongoing part of the world. Dishuman theorising entangles to disrupt the binary separations of idealised human identity and open to non-binary understandings of differencing as an ongoing relational process of identity production. Picture mappings created by the parents and intra-actively produced re-searching conversations entangled as human and non-human data companions.

Together with data-companions an analytical process of generatively making-with data unfolded through the chasing and tracing of moments of intensity that made themselves matter. These moments connected to produce generative stories across the data that re-turn parental love as a political concept from which new and deeply ethical stories of collective parenting can be told. A second connective web of stories re-turned temporalities to open to stories of disabled childhoods beyond the rigid and pre-determined linear temporalities of psy-developmentalism. This thesis enfolds new stories and possibilities for understanding parenting and disabled childhoods beyond the current dominant discourses through which these identities are currently understood.