Date: December 12th, 2022

Time: 1-3.30pm

Presenter 1, Name: Richard Woods

Presenter 2, Name: Andrew McEwan

Presenter 3, Name: ViKki McCall and Dianne-Dominique Theakstone

Talk 1, Title: “Pathological Demand-Avoidance”: exactly who has a “pathological” need to control whom?

Talk 1, Abstract:

“Pathological Demand-Avoidance” (PDA) is a proposed mental Disorder, centered on the avoidance of “ordinary” demands, typically the requests by other persons. There is substantial debate and many controversies surrounding it, including that PDA, is used to allow children to transgress adult-centric cultural norms due to the use of collaborative approaches; these include reducing demands, offering two-three choices, and negotiating with the child. Consequently, in 2013, Damian Milton asked, exactly who has a “pathological” need to control whom?

Investigating this question, a thematic analysis is being conducted of selected PDA literature. Two main preliminary themes are emerging. One is that there is a power struggle between adults and children believed to have PDA, and the second is a power struggle between advocates for the “PDA Profile of ASD”, and those critical of this outlook. These results will likely add to the PDA’s controversies and its ongoing-historical debates. There is an urgent need to attempt to establish a robust ethical case for using PDA in clinical and research settings.

Talk 2, Title: Towards an Avant-Garde Dishumanism

Talk 2, Abstract:

This talk will put the theories and aesthetics of avant-gardism into conversation with recent theories of mental disability arising from critical disability studies and madness studies. It does so in order to develop a critical approach that both expands literary disability studies’ formal criticism, and provoke avant-garde theorization to reconsider some of its founding aestheticization and metaphorization of mental disability. This talk develops this interdisciplinary encounter through analysis of avant-garde writing by poets who have documented lived experiences of mental disability and ableist harm. I analyze the modes by which mentally disabled avant-garde poets integrated disruptive aesthetics with their lived experience. Through this analysis, I theorize avant-garde dishumanist aesthetics and social critique, based in Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole’s theorization of dis/humanism. With critical attention to silenced narratives, a combined avant-garde dishumanism presents a complex temporality that acknowledges incompleteness, messiness, and the shifting critical positions of communicative relation in audiences of the present. Avant-garde dishumanist texts trouble normative and dominant ideologies for the purposes of creating experiences of future modes of relation and communication from located and embodied positions of disability. This talk ultimately argues for a literary disability studies approach informed by avant-garde poetics to both address the avant-garde’s roots in mental ableism, and deepen disability studies’ formal textual analysis.

Bio:

Andrew McEwan is the 2022-2023 Tanis Doe Postdoctoral Scholar in Gender, Disability, and Social Justice in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He researches and writes on literary and cultural representations of mental disability, madness, and neurodivergence. He has published academic writing in the edited collections Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health and Imaginary Safe House. He is also a writer with two published poetry collections: Repeater (shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award) and If Pressed, and the forthcoming Tours, Variously (2024). He has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad, Theory of Rooms, and Recoveringly (forthcoming 2023).

Talk 3, Title: New Project – Intersectionality of Stigma and Place-Based Ageing

Talk 3, Abstract: Come and join us to talk about our new project. We are looking to set up an advisory board and would like to hear from you about our ideas and potentially bring you on board.

The project synopsis

Stigma can lead to increased barriers to services, exclusion and negative experiences, yet little is known about the lived experiences of people impacted by several dimensions of stigma (intersectional stigma). The new Intersectional Stigma of Place-based Ageing (ISPA) Project will explore and understand how stigma attached to where people live, disability, and ageing intersect to give nuanced insights to the structures and systems that drive exclusion and to tackle inequalities experienced by older disabled adults.

This project will examine inequalities and stigma to develop interventions related to home and environmental modifications that encourage inclusive approaches that support people to age well within homes and communities.

This ambitious 5-year participatory mixed method study will include innovative analyses of secondary longitudinal quantitative data, new ethnographic qualitative data, and co-production with disabled community peer-reviewers. A new community peer-research group of disabled adults will be the heart of this project to developing more inclusive approaches to ageing in place that break down the barriers to access and inclusion in key services created by stigma.

Why this project is important

The ISPA project is so important because we know very little about how stigma intersects in different ways. Imagine that you live in an area which is often tarred with an unfair “blemish of place”. These are often our most multi-deprived areas and stigmatisation of place often results in underrepresentation, underinvestment and people living there often experience additional barriers. Now imagine you live in one of these stigmatised areas but you’re also experiencing ageism related to growing older. Perhaps also, you are living with a disability and experiencing discrimination due to this.

This project sets out to capture that nuance and intersectional experience and then translate those insights to changes in the home and wider environment that can tackle that stigma. We have an incredible range of partners signed up for our emerging Inclusive Living Alliance who are going to help us develop much more inclusive approaches to ageing-inplace.

Project team

The project is led by Dr Vikki McCall with Co-Investigators Professor

Alasdair Rutherford, Dr Kim McKee and Dr Dianne Theakstone, University

of Stirling in partnership with Dr Louise Reid, University of St Andrews,

Professor Rose Gilroy, Newcastle University and Professor David Manley,

University of Bristol.

Wider project co-investigators also include Debs Allan, Scottish Federation

of Housing Associations and Jeremy Porteus, Housing LIN.

Collaboration

The keystone to the project will be building an Inclusive Living Alliance, a

UK wide network.

Project partners already working with ISPA include:

The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI)

Foundations

Public Health Scotland

Horizon Housing Association

Springfield Properties plc

Link Housing Group

Motionspot

Stonewater Housing Association

Artlink Central

The Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers (ALACHO)

Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities (SCLD)

Care & Repair Scotland

Care & Repair Cymru

DRF Seminar Series 2022 - Event 3