“A different light”: examining impairment through parent narratives of childhood disability

Kelly, Susan E. (2005) “A different light”: examining impairment through parent narratives of childhood disability. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34 (2), 180-205. (doi:10.1177/0891241604272065).

Abstract

This article explores narratives of parenting a child with impairments for insight into impairment as both a materially and socially meaningful phenomenon. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents, a narrative approach is employed to explore the ambiguities of human impairment and embodiment as experienced by an intimate other. Parents’stories illustrate impairment as an intersubjective and intercorporeal accomplishment and illustrate multiple locations of meaning of impairment within the context of intimate social relationships. Narrative approaches have largely been identified with research on embodiment from the perspective of disabled people; it is argued that narrative accounts of embodied others may avoid dualisms of objective/subjective and social/natural that trouble current theoretical approaches to impairment.

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