“The need to listen carefully, or to find a way to take seriously the words of youth depends not only on methodological issues but on theoretical ones as well”
(Biklen, 2004, 722)
Biklen’s assertion resonates with paradigm shifts outlined earlier in the new sociology of childhood and disability research (Priestley, 2003; Shakespeare & Watson, 1999;
Wickenden, 2010). For new research approaches with formally silenced groups to emerge, a theoretical repositioning has to conceptualise them as social actors with ideas to share (Biklen, 2004). Being critically young is both theoretical and methodological.
Butler (1993b) distinguishes between being virtually queer, “which would be
experienced by anyone who failed to perform heterosexuality without contradiction and incoherence (i.e., everyone)” (McRuer, 2006, 30), and critically queer, which would mean “working to the weakness in the norm”, using the inevitable failure to meet up to this ‘ideal’ as a way of mobilising. McRuer (2006, 30) draws on this to distinguish between being virtually disabled and, what he terms, “severely disabled”:
“Everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are “intrinsically impossible to embody” fully and in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary […]. What we might call a critically disabled position, however, would differ from such a virtually disabled position; it would call attention to the ways in which the disability rights movement and disability studies have resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not continent on an able body.”
(McRuer, 2006, 30)
Like McRuer (2006) argues in reference to disability, I argued in Chapter Four the impossibility of embodying adulthood. We are all some hybrid form of child and adult. We can all be critically young by being vigilant to and consciously working against adulthood normativity: using the inevitable failure to meet up to adulthood normativity as a way of mobilising. I have argued from Chapter One onwards that adulthood is an ableist and hetronormative concept. Being critically young therefore requires us to
116 simultaneously be critically queer and severely disabled. Being critically young through a utopian project opens up the possibility of “a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not continent on an able body” (McRuer, 2006, 30) nor on the embodiment of adulthood ideals. Rather, we celebrate the non-conformists of youth and disability as they help me to consider research questions three and four: what can disability and the lived-experiences of young disabled people teach us about youth? And what can youth and the lived-experiences of young disabled people teach us about disability? I go one step further than those in the new sociology of childhood, therefore, not only approaching young disabled people as social actors with views to share, but arguing their marginal position is an advantage to ‘imagining otherwise’ (Shildrick, 2004).
The second part of my critically young methodology directly concerns the methods employed. Stepping outside of the ‘reality of the present’ and imagining one’s own utopia is hard. The arts and sci-fi therefore became useful resources. In a participatory project, Goltz (2009) used various methods (art, music, dance, writing) to ask young queer people “what does a queer future look like?” (566). Reflecting on the project, one participant responded “it was easy to write about the future at first. I put down marriage and kids, but then realized that wasn’t me. I’d never thought about it before” (571). Goltz writes that “fantasy was weighed down from the position of our current paths” (577), however, using a range of innovative methods the group was able “to escape the box of “now” and explore possibilities not presently conceivable” (577). Here again, we see crossover with disability and childhood research. Walmsley (2001, 189) argues that strives to make the whole research process accessible to people with intellectual impairments have led to creativity in the research process; and research involving children often adopts similarly creative methods (Best, 2007; Hay, Fawcett, & Bancroft, 2008). As a result data often consists of multiple strands (Darbyshire, MacDougall, & Schiller, 2005) and does not always appear in a traditional format, but may include written transcripts, alongside other medium such as photographs, artwork, video, and so on (see, for example, Wickenden, 2010).
Whether research with children warrants different methods to that with adults is debatable (Punch, 2002). To adopt different methods when working with formally silenced groups is to position them differently in relation to the powerful (pseudo)norm. Writing as youth work practitioners and academics, Jeffs and Smith (1999) problematise
117 the ‘youth’ in ‘youth work’. They argue that as ‘youth’ is itself a contested and weighted term, there are potential problems for those setting out to do youth work; not least arbitrary age boundaries and perceptions of who ‘needs’ youth work preventing many access to skilful practitioners. I argue similarly around research: creative methods, whether they are developed specifically for working with children/disabled/young people, can be helpful in a range of settings (Best, 2007; see Kellock et al., 2009, for creative research methods used with adults). Following Jeffs and Smith (1999), although I am at times critical that some services aimed at young people, attempt to fit them into normative adulthood (Kelly, 2003), I am not trying to insight any ‘us and them’, researcher/disabled people/practitioner binaries. Rather, I concur with Goodley and Clough (2004); researchers can learn to work innovatively with people from examples of good practice in other settings. Drawing on creative practice, therefore, becomes the second part of my critically young methodology. I embraced the subjective, partial and incomplete researcher/ed in journeys (to the future) together. I saw my researcher role being similar to that of Goltz, when he writes:
“As researcher, I embraced my role as cocreator with the participants. I performed in activities, engaged in discussion, danced, sang, and played. Typical to the ideals espoused by participant action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005), the line of researcher is one I worked to challenge, blur, diminish. The research space was designed to be generative for each of us, and my personal research marked one of many investigations that occurred simultaneously and collaboratively within this group. The data consist of the relationship and experience of the participants, myself included because I am inextricably part of the research.”
(Goltz, 2009, 567)
I consider the analytical implication of my positionality towards the end of this chapter. For now though, I turn to further outline the recruitment and methods employed over the different research contexts.