Putting the ‘Dis’ into Dysfluency: developing a disfluent methodology

Dysfluency is normatively defined in the Miller-Keane Encyclopaedia of Health (n.d.) as: ‘pathology involving speech that exhibits deviations in continuity, fluidity, ease of rate and effort, with hesitations or repetition of sounds, words, or phrases; lack of skilfulness in speech’. This woeful definition often becomes absorbed into the psyches and bodies of dysfluent speakers, who ally their speech within this interpretation as signifying lack, incompetence and embodied inconsistency. This can produce low self-esteem, an unwillingness to participate in conversations and overall anxiety. I propose that we reclaim this term, modifying it to

disfluency.

To ‘dis’ something is to disrupt, unsettle and tear apart the normative register, relentlessly probing and questioning taken-for-granted systems of thought. Dysfluent speakers do this automatically – pulling and twisting, bending and expanding sounds and silences, forcing the listener to ‘listen louder’ (Marshall, 2014) and to engage more fully in the reciprocal act of listening. Engaging in the act of disfluent research is to make a commitment to relationality; to focus more on our responsibilities as actively hearing components of the research process; and to critically evaluate the values and assumptions undergirding each way of relating. The concept of dis/fluency stimulates and exposes questions of why and how we value fluency. Following Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009) and Dan Goodley (2014), ‘dis-ing’ fluency can open up constructive sites for exploration which can interrogate the concept and the subsequent devaluation of ‘abnormal’ speech. We can become more consciously aware of how dis/fluent speech draws in and complicates the hegemonic expectations of speech and hearing. We can

92 carefully analyse the expectations around using voice in qualitative interviews to question the normative ableism ingrained in this usage. Applying the concept of dis/fluency to a research setting, we can become more critical about the choices we make in our research designs and the methods we employ to carry out a study. We can become more conscious that, for many people, speech and hearing are value-laden phenomena that represent a multitude of concerns that may trigger internalised ableism. In this recognition, we can become more sensitised, more compassionate to finding and exploring many different ways of communicating that are not limited to the spoken or written word.

In my own PhD journey, I am seeking permission to conduct my assessments in a different manner. Each PhD candidate has to go through an oral examination wherein they defend or speak about the research project they are proposing or defending. This, as the reader may infer from this chapter, aroused feelings of anxiety and dread in me. My supervisor and I worked together to propose a new way of doing this, wherein I would have a list of questions that would be directed at me, and so I had the opportunity to think about them and write my responses, which I would then read out to the assessors. I felt that, in asking for this accommodation, I would be begging and pleading, continuously signifying a ‘lack’ in me that needed the help of the kindly University. An alternative way of looking at this is that I was challenging the normative and restrictive method of assessment, effectively ‘dis-ing’ the primacy of speech and voice as the ultimate method of conveying understanding. My research as a whole is, hopefully, disrupting the primacy of normative research. In practice, the concept of dis/fluency results in me feeling more comfortable, more ‘at ease’ with taking my own Crip time to speak and enter into conversations. I am in effect critiquing the potentially neoliberal underbelly of research, seeking out methodologies that do not result in psycho-emotional ableism. However, I do acknowledge that my use of the written word is potentially exclusionary for some. This is why I have tried to incorporate a range of methods in which participants can communicate their story to me. I am not hoping to provide a universal, ‘catch-all’ method of research design that would cater for all needs – and would be extremely hesitant to even attempt to do this. What I am attempting to do is explore disfluent methods, keeping the frictions and contradictions in play. I acknowledge that in this exploration, there will be moments of disruption and precarious displacement, but also moments of fluency and continuity where I will be using the written word. There will inevitably be moments of disablism and exclusion, and moments where I draw on dominant modes of research methodology. I hope, though, that this discussion will enliven

93 and inspire new ways of thinking about research with the notion of dis/fluency an integral consideration.

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5.1 Overview

This section will reorient the reader to the initial aims of Project One, exploring the psycho- emotional consequences of neoliberal ableist education. I have three key areas of concern that I want to address with this study:

 How is the neoliberal ableist agenda inculcated into university institutions?

 How does this impact upon the psycho-emotional well-being of disabled students?

 What alternatives could be conceived of for the future of education that goes beyond

the neoliberal agenda?

This is a project that seeks to uncover the dysconscious (King, 1991; Broderick & Lalvani, 2017) acts of ableism in an educational context, re-cognising and re-presenting them in an effort to unsettle hegemonic practice. Dysconscious processes, as defined by King (1991), are encultured in an ‘uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as a given’ (King, 1991:135). King originally applied her notion of ‘dysconscious’ to an analysis of racism in teacher education, but I argue that it has particular applicability here. The practices of ableism in education are often characterised not by unconscious processes, but by misguided and distorted ways of thinking about disability and disabled students. They are often tacit and unintentional, but this does not justify the harm inflicted onto the students. The biases of neoliberal ableism are so implicit, so ingrained and accepted that disabled students fold these insidious processes on themselves, as we shall discover in the following analysis. This project is conceived of as a way of imagining alternative visions of society that embodiment of disability creatively entails (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015).

I shall be using the theoretical perspectives of Studies in Ableism (SiA) and critical social psychoanalysis especially in this chapter in order to highlight the performance of ableism and the consequences of this performance on my cohort of disabled students. I will touch upon my own experiences of university education, but the voices the reader will hear are predominantly the ones of my participants, interwoven with theoretical literature when appropriate. We shall journey into the depths of the reflexive thematic analysis that I carried out on the data for

95 Project One, exploring the themes of belonging; lack of appropriate support; and internalised ableism. The second theme, ‘lack of appropriate support’ is intended to relocate some of the responsibility for the failure of my participants to thrive in their university settings back on to the lack of provision and understanding from the universities themselves. This can have dire consequences on the self-esteem and perceptions of self-worth of my participants, as we shall see. I explore the consequences of compulsory able-bodiedness highlighted by my participant’s stories, and reveal the damage that internalising scripts that devalue disability can do.