Disability, Sibling Relationships and Everyday Life: Exploring Mundane Realities as Counter-Stories

This thesis explores the childhood experiences of siblings of people with learning disabilities in the UK. Research around this topic has often reproduced deficit narratives that centre non-disabled sibling outcomes, reinforcing pathological understandings of learning disability. This work sets out to disrupt these dominant discourses through bringing together understandings from family sociology and critical disability studies in order to generate counter-narratives that speak to the everyday of siblinghood and learning disability. To do this, narrative interviews were conducted with 14 siblings (aged 18-32) of people with learning disabilities. As part of the interviews participants were asked to bring along photographs and a timeline of their childhood. The data are presented through narrative thematic analysis, with narrative portraits being offered as a means to centre participant stories in their own words.

The findings provide stories of the everyday of siblinghood and disability, with participants reflecting on sharing bedrooms, dinnertime and other mundane activities. Within these stories are moments of care, conflict, humour and frustration that speak to wider understandings of siblinghood offered by family sociology. Alongside this, insight is given into the role of wider society in sibling experiences, with discussions of support services and public interactions. These narratives contain nuanced understandings of disability, family and siblinghood with participants reflecting on the role of expectations of siblinghood in how they understand their lives and offering conceptualisations of learning disability that disrupt commonplace narratives. Considering counter-narratives, the participant accounts are full of joy, humour and self-reflection that challenge dominant understandings offering crip accounts of siblinghood. Throughout, the thesis offers new understandings of siblinghood and learning disability, presenting holistic stories of the everyday that reject deficit understandings and centre the human.