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In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

This paper aims to describe how a sense of normalcy for young people in foster care can be critical to their well-being.

This paper reports on policy and practice efforts in the USA to promote normalcy for youth in care. The authors review policy that promotes normalcy and report on one organization's efforts to support these goals.

COVID-19 has offered profound challenges to the goal of normalcy. Rise Above has adapted to meet the challenges.

The authors argue that COVID may also offer opportunities to build toward a more robust paradigm of normalcy within child welfare policy and practice.

Chronic health conditions can cause children extended school absences, creating significant barriers for continued education. Out‐of‐school learning environments, such as hospitals, provide opportunities to maintain children's learning identities during school absences. This paper seeks to present an example of hospital‐based teaching and learning and to explore the challenges of providing child‐centred learning opportunities in this environment.

A case study narrative describes the underpinnings of child‐centred teaching and learning within a children's hospital. The “Around the World” learning activity is used to discuss the challenges and strategies when fostering learning environments for children with diverse needs.

The paper highlights how pedagogy is apparent in a children's health setting. Reflective teacher practice translated pedagogical principles into dynamic, situated learning activities that engaged children visiting a hospital Out‐patients area. The display of learning artefacts within Out‐patients helped raise awareness of the learning identities of children within the hospital.

This case study is one example of the learning opportunities that can be fostered within a hospital. The findings have implications for educators in both traditional and alternative learning environments regarding how spaces can be used to “seize the moment” with children in their care. The learning needs of adolescents spending time in hospital also need to be met in developmentally appropriate ways.

This paper illustrates how a hospital, as a traditionally held “health” space, can be reconceptualised as a learning space to accommodate the multiple identities of children and build a shared understanding between education and health professionals of the value of integrating learning into a holistic and child‐centred model of care.

Poor mental health is common amongst unaccompanied refugee adolescents and may have serious negative consequences for their successful settlement. This study aims to elucidate unaccompanied adolescents’ experiences of psychosocial challenges and what they need to cope with this during their course of settlement in Denmark, particularly focussing on social support.

The study sample included six male unaccompanied refugee adolescents aged 17–18, living in two residential care facilities. Based on a triangulation of methods (i.e. participant observation, individual interviews and a focus group interview using photo-elicitation), a thematic analysis was conducted within the conceptual framework of stigma and a need for relatedness.

Several interwoven and on-going psychosocial challenges, including perceived stigma and loneliness combined with past traumatic experiences and uncertainties about the future, were experienced by the adolescents in this study. As opposed to experiencing emotional distress, stigma and loneliness, various activities of “forgetting”, which involved a sense of momentary relief or bliss, a sense of “normalcy” and acceptance and/or a sense of relatedness, helped them to cope.

For psychosocial care services to respond to adolescents’ mental health needs in an optimal way, the results suggest that activities and social support that are sufficiently adapted to individual needs should be the focal point in their daily lives.

The study offers insights into the needs of unaccompanied refugee adolescents in coping with the psychosocial challenges experienced in their daily lives.

The situating of pimatisiwin as a framework for spatial justice and self-determination aids educators in strengthening their understandings of Indigenous knowledges to support an authentic inclusion of Indigenous students with disabilities. Through the sharing of Canada’s colonial history, and by critically examining the principles of care within special education, the author exposes its relationship with ableism, normalcy, eugenics, and white privilege to show how Indigenous peoples continue to be marginalized in the twenty-first century. This justice work asks educators to shift their perspectives of inclusion and wellness through the insertion of an Indigenous lens, one to help them see and hear the faces and voices of disabled Aboriginal children and their kinships. The chapter discusses the social model of disability, the psychology of Gentle Teaching, Indigenous ethics, and principles of natural laws through the voices of Nehiyawak and other knowledge keepers, in order to suggest an agenda for educators to come to an understanding of an emancipatory and gentle education. Spatial justice and Indigenous epistemologies merge as synergistic, inclusive, and holistic entities, to support Aboriginal children and youth as both they and those who teach learn to celebrate disabled ontologies. The chapter concludes by presenting how Gentle Teaching and Indigenous ways of knowing should be honored in this quest of creating an equitable, caring, and inclusive society for all disabled Indigenous children and youth.

The purpose of this paper is to extend and apply the systems model of the household proposed by Dixon, his colleagues, and his students to situations in which vulnerable consumers are not able to follow the purely rational models of economics. The case of homeless families is examined.

The paper presents a literature review, an introduction of Baker et al.'s concepts of consumer normalcy and consumer vulnerability, and an application of expanded model to consumer studies of homeless persons published by Ronald Hill and his colleagues.

The same household systems models might be used to unfold the complex problems that can undermine the functioning in a household, causing it to be unproductive and potentially fail. Applications of the concepts of “consumer normalcy” and “consumer vulnerability” provide a useful platform to develop public policy recommendations, the example of homeless persons will be considered as an illustration.

The extension and application is limited in that it is applied to analyze data collected approximately 20 years ago. The research should be extended to actual homeless households in the present day, and to additional “types” of households who are likely to encounter vulnerabilities as consumers (e.g. persons with disabilities).

The four levels of household processes (employment, purchasing, home‐production, and consumption) provide a useful framework for examining households in which vulnerabilities occur. This approach is useful in identifying the gaps in the household processes that can slow down productivity and instead introduce confusion and demoralization, plus continue the spiral of economic deprivation.

For over 50 years, the work of Goffman has played an important role in identifying individuals and households that did not fit societal norms, resulting in their possibly experiencing conditions of stigmatization. Examining specific household types in terms of the functionality or dysfunctionality of their use of inputs may allow researchers to recommend various types of support, training, or assistance related to the household as a system, rather than focusing on the individual without considering the household dynamics.

This paper takes a general systems approach in applying the concepts of consumer normalcy and consumer vulnerability, both based in behavioral theories in the social sciences, to the economic approach to the household emphasizing rational decision making and orderly production functions.

Using queer/crip theory as a frame, I examine the narratives of 17 mothers raising children with disabilities.

Results show that the mothers’ narratives of an imagined future for their children often involve the idea of success in terms of production and reproduction. However, some mothers do question this idea of normalcy, challenge deeply seated ideas about neoliberal inclusion, and reframe disability as a different way of existing as opposed to a deficient way of being.

The focus of this paper is on how mothers imagine different kinds of social arrangements. Some mothers, instead of embracing success as narrowly defined under neoliberalism, challenge the idea and instead offer queer narratives of parenting. This study illustrates how counternarratives can be constructed to resist prevailing narratives of disability as deficiency.

Women with HIV have increased longevity and the potential for decreasing mother to child transmission with the use of antiretroviral therapy. Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1980, the disease has evolved from an acute condition to a chronic one. How have women long-term survivors transitioned from a “death sentence” to living with HIV/AIDS as a chronic illness? In this study, we investigate the reproductive, mothering, and living experiences of HIV positive women 10 years after their participation in a study of their reproductive decisions. The sample was taken from two groups of women living with HIV (n = 60), one in Oakland, California (n = 30) and one in Rochester, New York (n = 30). Both groups participated in the initial study (1995–2001). The inclusion criteria for this study are women with HIV who are living and well enough to participate in a face-to-face interview. Of the original 60 women, 52 women are living. Two and one half years into this 4-year study, the author has completed interviews with 25 women from Oakland (n = 10) and Rochester (n = 15). An unexpected life with HIV challenges participants to live a viable life different from their pre-diagnosed life. It involves a life of defining normalcy in everyday experiences and building a legacy of a life worth living. Participants’ issues and concerns of living with HIV/AIDS identify what kinds of cultural notions, and medical and social interventions support or undermine women's reproductive, mothering, and long-term living with HIV/AIDS.

In this chapter, we examine how the media in India constructed the lives, needs, and desires of disabled children in India during the tumultuous pandemic.

Through critical discourse analysis, we address how children's bodies and needs have been explicitly discursively constructed as “excessive,” while implicitly drawing upon neoliberal, ableist logics of loss and productivity.

We foreground how the framing of COVID-19 as a disaster in the Indian context obscures state neglect, suggesting that inequality has been the result of the pandemic rather than the limits of state care under neoliberal ableism. Despite the recognition of gaps in the care received by disabled children, neoliberal, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged as a new, widely touted form of care during the pandemic.

Through our analysis, we highlight how disabled children have been neglected by the state and constructed as burdensome and vulnerable. We argue that this occurs when disabled children's bodyminds do not conform to an ideal of the self-reliant, independent citizen under the logics of neoliberal ableism. Our work demonstrates how children with disabilities are discursively rendered absent from conceptualizations of normate citizenship, unless seen as contributing to current or future aspirations for state productivity and growth.