Youth and Disability

In this ground-breaking book Jenny Slater uses the lens of ’the reasonable’ to explore how normative understandings of youth dis/ability and the intersecting identities of gender and sexuality impact upon the lives of young dis/abled people. Although youth and disability have separately been thought within socio-cultural frameworks rarely have sociological studies of ’youth’ and ’disability’ been brought together. By taking an interdisciplinary critical disability studies approach to explore the socio-cultural concepts of ’youth’ and ’disability’ alongside one-another Slater convincingly demonstrates that ’youth’ and ’disability’ have been conceptualised within medical/psychological frameworks for too long. With chapters focusing on access and youth culture independence autonomy and disabled people’s movements and the body gender and sexuality this volume’s intersectional and transdisciplinary engagement with social theory offers a significant contribution to existing theoretical and empirical literature and knowledges around disability and youth. Indeed through highlighting the ableism of adulthood and the falsity of conceptualising youth as a time of becoming-independent-adult the need to shift approaches to research around dis/abled youth is one of the main themes of the book. This book therefore is a provocation to rethink what is implicit about ’youth’ and ’disability’. Moreover through such an endeavour this book sits as a challenge to Mr Reasonable.