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Recommended read for PGR's researching disability and inclusion, anyone in school leadership role, or anyone interested in making workplaces more inclusive. The authors not only highlights barriers autistic staff encounter  but provides constructive solutions that can be adopted to create better inclusive schools that support diverse needs of staff and students. I love the fact that this book originated from research findings of a doctoral project.

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The Autistic School Staff Project team was delighted to be commissioned by Jessica Kingsley Publishers to produce an edited book: Learning from Autistic Teachers: How to be a Neurodiversity-Inclusive School. The book, the first of its kind in the autism field, contains chapters by autistic school staff who work or have worked in schools in a range of roles, and covers diverse topics such as intersectionality, strong interests, teacher training, issues of revealing diagnosis, race, the strengths of autistic teachers, leadership, mentorship and much more! Susanna Matthan and Sara Peeters are both providing illustrations. With the exception of the ASSP team members, the chapter authors are as follows:

Mica Coleman-Jones, Head of School; Lucy Coward, English teacher; Elkie Kammer, Learning Support Teacher and author; Claire O'Neill, deputy Principal; Jade Ponnudurai, Autism hub co-ordinator and former learning support teacher; Susanna Matthan, artist and former teacher in Pupil Referral Units; Joan McDonald, founder of Posautive and former Special Needs Organiser; Andrew Miller, author and former deputy Head Autism Advisory teacher; Yasmeen Multani, university lecturer and former teacher; Eiman Munro, teacher and EdD student; Kieran Rose: speaker, advocate and campaigner and former teaching assistant; Pete Wharmby: speaker, writer and former English teacher; Madge Woollard, peripatetic music teacher.

Further chapters are provided by Ruth Moyse and Rebecca Wood, both former teachers, and Alan Morrison, a current teacher. The Foreword is by Laura Crane and Francesca Happé.

Read an extract of Claire O'Neill's chapter in Sanctuary magazine which featured our book as part of Autism Acceptance month.

Read an interview with Rebecca about the book in Scottish Autism's Share magazine.

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The Autistic School Staff Project team was delighted to be commissioned by Jessica Kingsley Publishers to produce an edited book: Learning from Autistic Teachers: How to be a Neurodiversity-Inclusive School. The book, the first of its kind in the autism field, contains chapters by autistic school staff who work or have worked in schools in...

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After spending months speaking on the phone and online…( My husband and I met online …long story) …..on our first date …He gifted me chocolates and this tiny necklace with a white heart pendant ….chose to recreate that as my talisman ....dedicated to my husband .....who supports and encourages me to follow my passion..... my enabler who despite various challenges made pursuing my PhD dream....a reality ❤️

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Three owls by Sheona ~ made by scrunching, squeezing and pulling to see what appeared. I was at my parents' house and this was the paper to hand. I am considering autoethnography as a methodology so tackled the activity similarly to the "into the woods without a compass" approach explained by Ellis (2004, p.120). It also resonated with Sarah Todorov's description of scrutinising her interpretative phenomenological analysis data wondering if any findings would surface. The owls symbolise wisdom: the wisdom to approach a challenging subject sensitively; to discover truths from experience and to present these truths appropriately to practitioners and policy makers. I hope to develop the wisdom in others to notice, question and act when something doesn't seem right with a child. 

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Three owls by Sheona ~ made by scrunching, squeezing and pulling to see what appeared. I was at my parents' house and this was the paper to hand. I am considering autoethnography as a methodology so tackled the activity similarly to the "into the woods without a compass" approach explained by Ellis (2004, p.120). It also resonated with Sarah Todorov's description of scrutinising her interpretative phenomenological analysis data wondering if any findings would surface. The owls symbolise wisdom: the wisdom to approach a challenging subject sensitively; to discover truths from experience and to present these truths appropriately to practitioners and policy makers. I hope to develop the wisdom in others to notice, question and act when something doesn't seem right with a child. 

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...a human hand.  I like how it is imperfect, akin to my current participant's left hand which is more greatly effected by cerebral palsy.  

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a fist to show how important my identity as activist is to me within my research

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Fragility, beauty... bringing the margins to the centre, listening to unique voices in all their diversities and how we all are on a journey both researcher and participants, and our inter-dependencies, of valuing experience, knowledge and learning  are inextricably bound... towards a humanising, nurturing eco-system in these times of hostility  and crisis.... to value indigenous natural voices and processes. Thank you Neeta, Jules and Sharon :)

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My talisman....a book, showing my garden office under tree, which has been my sanctuary and workspace..and the infinity symbol representing my autistic identity 

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My talisman....a book, showing my garden office under tree, which has been my sanctuary and workspace..and the infinity symbol representing my autistic identity 

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Sara's talisman

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Listen to this unique album of 'data poetry'  by Simone Eringfeld, a musician, spoken word artist, researcher & educationist.

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Listen to this unique album of 'data poetry'  by Simone Eringfeld, a musician, spoken word artist, researcher & educationist.

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Simone Eringfeld is a musician, spoken word artist, researcher & educationist. For her debut album PLEASE HOLD, Simone interviewed students and professors at Cambridge University about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives and education. Their touching stories led to the creation of this unique album of 'data poetry' set to music, whereby every line of text comes straight out of this research.

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Simone Eringfeld is a musician, spoken word artist, researcher & educationist. For her debut album PLEASE HOLD, Simone interviewed students and professors at Cambridge University about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives and education. Their touching stories led to the creation of this unique album of 'data poetry' set to music, whereby every line of text comes straight out of this research.

Audio playback seems to be disabled or not working in your browser.

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Simone Eringfeld is a musician, spoken word artist, researcher & educationist. For her debut album PLEASE HOLD, Simone interviewed students and professors at Cambridge University about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives and education. Their touching stories led to the creation of this unique album of 'data poetry' set to music, whereby every line of text comes straight out of this research.

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https://open.spotify.com/track/2twWz0N63vzscJsz6lBXyB?si=j-8OuFYITr-abP3h17P0Kw

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...Opening Spotify...

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… we have no beginning, no end, no agenda.

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I shared the found poems I had crafted from interview transcripts as well as research findings with my participants. Their feedback and approval was important for me. I am sharing snippets of some of their feedback (of course with their permission)

"It is so reassuring to read the collective experiences of your participants; to know that it wasn’t just me who experienced these things. Your research is going to make a real difference"

"These poems are brilliant. What an innovative way of analysing and presenting data. I love it."

" The poems are amazing. I love them! You've done such a good job with them"

"You should publish it, and I don't just mean as a thesis. It synthesises so much of the experience, the challenges, the strengths, the advantages and the barriers. I love that I am part of this research"

"The poems are so beautiful…  tough sometimes and true in my experience,  in many ways. Thanks for doing this work"

" I was honoured to be a part of your study .......I cannot thank you enough for making and holding space for us teachers to share our stories".

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If interviewing your participants is part of your methodology, I would highly recommend reading this article. this article has been inspirational to me especially the multiple aspects of 'Listening'.

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Those that work together play together...

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Those that work together play together...

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I regularly muse over the relational element of my work - I spend more time with some of my students than my own family.

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Dr Anne Görlich’s  discussing   applying poetic inquiry to understand educational  experiences of  marginalised youth. Please visit https://youtu.be/-GxSFO1wqJk

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Dr Anne Görlich’s  discussing   applying poetic inquiry to understand educational  experiences of  marginalised youth. Please visit https://youtu.be/-GxSFO1wqJk

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Poetic inquiry understanding youth on the margins of education

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Presentation by a poetic inquiry group I attend every month at the Poetic Inquiry Symposium in Cape Town. Collaborative poetry created by groups shared is fascinating.

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Presentation by a poetic inquiry group I attend every month at the Poetic Inquiry Symposium in Cape Town. Collaborative poetry created by groups shared is fascinating.

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One in a Group: Silence and Invisibility in the Academy

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This article unpacks pandemic experiences of four researchers, who use "feminist collaborative auto-ethnography" as a multifocal method to highlight their individual and collaborative musings. 

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This article unpacks pandemic experiences of four researchers, who use "feminist collaborative auto-ethnography" as a multifocal method to highlight their individual and collaborative musings. 

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Dan Goodley makes a case for disability research understanding parents and their disabled children as deconstructing or (re)deterritorializing the areas of policy, politics, practice, theory and activism.

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In order for the sociological study of disability to enable, then it must be ready to conceptualize complex terrains of knowledge and activism. Research has to work alongside disabled people, their allies, their practices, their resistances and their theorizing. This paper makes a case for a framework of understanding that situates such work. Disability studies tends to understand its concepts (e.g. disability, exclusion, inclusion, impairment, politicization, people) as entities rooted in arborescent and hierarchical forms of knowledge. These modernist misconceptions can be challenged through understanding knowledge, practice, living and activism as rhizomatic, captured as lines of flight which are always becoming. As a new reader of Deleuze and Guattari, I make a case for disability research understanding parents and their disabled children as deconstructing or (re)deterritorializing the areas of policy, politics, practice, theory and activism. Creating burrows for shelter and eventual breakout, becoming 'angel makers', drawing on narratives of parents of disabled babies, this paper maps out a vision of parents not blocked by the strata of disabling society, but enabled by lines of flight, resistance, flux and change. This paper aims to be Deleuzoguattarian but only in ways that fit the complexities of parents' accounts.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the empirical work of my colleague Pamela Fisher, whose interviews with parents are drawn upon in this paper. In addition, colleagues at the University of Newcastle (Janice McLaughlin and Emma Clavering) have provided invaluable support and feedback. Our project web site details their publications and other writings that bring together analyses from both sites of the project ( http://www.shef.ac.uk/disabledbabies/). Thanks are also due to Julie Allan, Phil Bayliss, Laurence Hopkins, David Hyatt, Rebecca Mallett, Rebecca Lawthom, Griet Roets and Kathryn Runswick Cole for debate and discussions around the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the project from which this paper has emerged (ESRC grant RES‐000-23-0129).

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Becoming rhizomatic parents: Deleuze, Guattari and disabled babies

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In order for the sociological study of disability to enable, then it must be ready to conceptualize complex terrains of knowledge and activism. Research has to work alongside disabled people, their allies, their practices, their resistances and their theorizing. This paper makes a case for a framework of understanding that situates such work.

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My daughter is in the bright pink t-shirt (mouth wide open)

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Facing her fears head on... reminding me to be brave and to take risks!

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Wildflowers 'There is still plenty of room to grow and be ourselves; community gardens are not moves toward assimilation, but spontaneous cultivations of difference'

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Wildflowers 'There is still plenty of room to grow and be ourselves; community gardens are not moves toward assimilation, but spontaneous cultivations of difference'

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this is just a beautiful article, which I urge you to read, ideally sat outside listening to bird song as you do!

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Coming across this blog (via twitter - where I spend far too much time!) was a godsend! It provided me with permission to not attempt to 'tidy' the mess or know where my inquiry was heading, acknowledging that it would not be a linear journey always at the same pace but that it might head off in multiple directions at a range of paces and that was just ok. Phew! I recommend this blog post to anyone just starting out on their doctoral journey as a reminder it is ok to sit within the mess!

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I'm currently in my final year of a PhD exploring transition to adulthood for young people with learning disabilities. It is a PhD which has taken far longer than anticipated thanks to a pause for maternity leave and a subsequent switch from full to part time study. However, as I edge closer to the finish line I find myself spending an increasing amount of time reflecting back over the past few years wondering not only where the time has gone, but questioning what I have learnt or achieved, whether I feel more competent now than at the start of the PhD and, if the thesis has evolved as I thought it would. Invariably I find myself being critical. The time has gone far too quickly, and I still don't feel I know enough to warrant a PhD; I certainly don't have the neat, polished thesis that I naively envisaged before I began. However, drawing on principles of new materialism and Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) notion of assemblages within my thesis discussion chapter has, surprisingly, helped me to understand the research process as a whole. This, in turn, has helped me to accept my messy thesis and given clarity on my position as neither academic nor non-academic but becoming academic.

I embarked on the PhD after more than a decade of working with people with learning disabilities and I found the leap between working in services and academia challenging. I had to learn how to write 'academically' and get to grips with my epistemological and ontological stance - something I had never before questioned. Imposter syndrome was (and is) ever present as I questioned whether I belonged, whether I knew enough and, not least, whether I would be able to make an original contribution to knowledge. However, alongside this I also found myself no longer feeling fully comfortable with my position supporting people with learning disabilities and, at times, I felt a fraud. On the one hand I was writing about the power of language, the way in which the labels we assign and the terms we use perpetuate the marginalisation of people with learning disabilities (the blogs written by Mark Neary and Bryony Shannon are both excellent resources for this). However, on the other hand, I was then going to work and using those very terms making me complicit in the continued othering of people with learning disabilities. I felt caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

This sense of homelessness and lack of academic confidence is present within my research and contributes towards the mess within the thesis. For example, early in the thesis I pledge an allegiance to social constructionism, yet the discussion chapters move ever closer to a new materialist philosophy. The leap between these two stances is jarring; can you change tack in such a manner? St. Pierre (2015) warns of ontological incoherence occurring when post humanist concepts are brought into an otherwise humanist qualitative project (Monforte 2018) and I fear I am guilty of this incoherence. Should the earlier chapters be revised to ensure new materialism is threaded throughout, the analysis repeated using an assemblage approach rather than thematic analysis? If not, how does one reconcile the jump which exposes my academic immaturity?

It is here, drawing upon the notion of assemblage is useful. Following a Deleuzoguattarian approach (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), assemblages are comprised of heterogenous elements working together to produce something. The elements are linked together relationally by affects with affects representing change. This change may be physical, psychological, emotional or social and as elements are affected their capacities to affect and be affected also alter. Furthermore, each element is part of multiple other assemblages. Thus:

"an assemblage is an emergent, temporarily stable yet continually mutating conglomeration of bodies, properties, things, affects and materialities. Assemblages are not background structures, static situations or stable entities; they are active, always emergent and changing confederations of bodies, objects, spaces, affects, forces and desires" (Taylor and Harris-Evans 2018: 1258).

With this in mind, rather than viewing the PhD as a journey, as it is commonly described, I suggest approaching the PhD as a research assemblage. Doing so encourages a move away from the imagery of the linear pathway which pressures us to continuously move forward, a path with a clear start and end point where the destination, the Dr title which lies in wait, signifies your arrival as a knowledgeable person. Instead, the research assemblage brings forth the complexity and the interconnectedness of research, the entangling of ourselves, our personal lives, research participants, supervisors, buildings, ideas, books, technologies, fears, desires and so on. Each element within this assemblage having the capacity to affect and be affected, to alter the course of events. Mess is to be expected as the thesis, one element of the research assemblage, is a becoming. We cannot predict where it will end up or what we will end up with due to the shifting nature of the assemblage and the elements within it (COVID-19 perhaps being a prime example of an element unexpectedly drawn into the assemblage and affecting others within, the course of the research or shape of the thesis). Thus, whilst the initial design of my thesis reflects the research assemblage at that particular moment in time, the discussion is a reflection of the present and the flows of affect acting within the research assemblage over the previous four years. Within the literature review, I draw on the tweets and blogs of both academics and non-academics in an attempt to entwine the two worlds I found myself caught between, recognising that both worlds belong within my research assemblage (Ribenfors 2020). Furthermore, just as the thesis is a becoming, we too, as researchers, are becoming. The Dr title does not signify a change of state from non-academic to academic, unknowing to knowing, rather we are always becoming academic, becoming researcher, constantly unfolding within the assemblage with "neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination" (Taylor and Harris-Evans 2018: 1263).

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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone.

Monforte, J. (2018) What is new in new materialism for a newcomer? Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. 10 (3), 378-390

Ribenfors, F. (2020) Jo Campling Essay Prize, Postgraduate Winner, 2019, Whose Knowledge Counts? Rewriting the Literature Review to Include Marginalised Voices. Ethics and Social Welfare, 14 (2), 230-237

St. Pierre, E. A. (2015) Practices for the 'new' in the New Empiricisms, the New Materialisms, and Post-qualitative Research in Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Research, edited by N.K. Denzin and M.D. Giardina, 75-96. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Taylor, C. and Harris-Evans, J. (2018) Reconceptualising transition to Higher Education with Deleuze and Guattari. Studies in Higher Education, 43 (7), 1254-1267.

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Francesca is a recipient of a Manchester Metropolitan Graduate School Research Support Award. The next deadline for Research Support Award applications is Friday 15 January 2021 at 5pm. Find out more by visiting the PGR Development Moodle area.

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The research assemblage: re-imagining the PhD 'mess'

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I'm currently in my final year of a PhD exploring transition to adulthood for young people with learning disabilities. It is a PhD which has taken far longer than anticipated thanks to a pause for maternity leave and a subsequent switch from full to part time study.

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I was fortunate enough to be involved in a zine making workshop rub by Mindy, Lisa and Nughmana during my PhD (Researchers Don't Cry). This podcast features a discussion by Lisa and Nughmana about their experiences of friendship and how it enhanced their research. For me, friendship has been a vital part of my doctoral studies and this podcast really resonated with me.

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‎Just Humans: Friends: Dr Lisa Bradley and Dr Nughmana Mirza on Apple Podcasts

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‎SCCJR besties Lisa Bradley and Nughmana Mirza first met when doing their PhD's at the University of Glasgow and soon found they had a lot in common; their research interests, having busy home lives with young kids, wanting to do academia differently and a shared love of chatting over cake and coffee...

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'personal histories should be seen as highly relevant to the methodological assumptions we hold'

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'personal histories should be seen as highly relevant to the methodological assumptions we hold'

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a discussion of how our histories influence our methodological becomings as doctoral researchers

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The study indicated that the students' methodological assumptions may be understood as a socially constructed product of their life histories and academic experiences. Experiences of postgraduate research training were presented as having the potential to unlock the methodological consciousness required to re-frame these experiences, improve understanding and resolve methodological conflict.

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Methodological becoming: Doctoral students' perceptions of their methodological journeys

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The study indicated that the students' methodological assumptions may be understood as a socially constructed product of their life histories and academic experiences. Experiences of postgraduate research training were presented as having the potential to unlock the methodological consciousness required to re-frame these experiences, improve understanding and resolve methodological conflict.

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Emile was one of my undergraduate lecturers. I took inspiration from his writing about conversation as research to help design my inquiry

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I listened to this webinar during Covid and really enjoyed Iris van der Tuin's discussion about serendipity within research. It gave me confidence to allow connections to be made between disparate experiences or texts or objects within my theorising

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Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry

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Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Session 1  Iris van der Tuin and Amy Pekal

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Love how these researchers focused on the resistance of people with profound and multiple learning difficulties to propose how to improve choice making and wellbeing whilst recognising the difficulties for staff in institutions to do so 💜

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Love how these researchers focused on the resistance of people with profound and multiple learning difficulties to propose how to improve choice making and wellbeing whilst recognising the difficulties for staff in institutions to do so 💜

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2021 Nicholson - PIMD, Ethnography - Resistance

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'Nothing about us without us' is challenging for people with profound and multiple learning difficulties - this paper helped me rationalise my argument...

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'Nothing about us without us' is challenging for people with profound and multiple learning difficulties - this paper helped me rationalise my argument...