Introduction: Disabled Children – Contested Caring

Summary

The essays in this volume span many countries and different time periods, but they are united by a common set of approaches to childhood disability. These stem from seeing experiences as the outcome of personal circumstances and social structures, and offer an experiential critique of the dominant ‘social model’ originating in disability studies and developed within materialist histories of disability. The ‘social model’ tends to emphasize ‘disabling’ factors contributing to the exclusion of disabled people from the mainstream of society and contrasts with ‘individual models of disability’ that rely on notions of personal impairment. The intention of this volume is to develop a sense of contested caring. Rather than concentrate on the role of institutional factors contributing to disability the focus is on exploring how they shaped experiences of childhood disability in a variety of complex, unpredictable and sometimes contradictory ways. The book explores the varied, but distinctive, experiences of disabled children through their interaction with a range of specialist educational (Chapters 4 and 11) and medical services (Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 7–10). Provision for disabled children initially evolved in an institutional context (see Chapters 1–5, 7 and 9) and such segregated care often involved lengthy separations from families and communities. Over time the reach of these services was extended, and care was offered in new ways.