Reading silences/silent readings: Disrupting the hegemony of voice in research with disabled children

Abstract

By referring to an example from my doctoral research with children labeled and diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, I make a case for the ways that reading silences and silent readings within research are not only necessary but integral to refusing the claims of western colonial logics while also attending to the circulation of power imbalances within research processes. One of the key aims is to consider how embodied knowledges might increase access and inclusion of disabled children in knowledge production.

As an elementary school teacher and novice researcher, I have been situated within the troubling place of childhood studies in ways that continue to leave me wondering about how to engage in knowledge making and sharing practices in distinctly different and hopefully transformative ways. My reference to childhood studies as a troubling place takes into consideration what Spyrou (2018) has referred to as: “a clear dissatisfaction with theoretical approaches, most notably in psychology but also in sociology and anthropology where notions of children as becomings rather than beings prevailed for much of the 20th century” (p. 15). To put it differently, the notion that children are in the process of becoming human that normative development hinges upon, has proven very troublesome both in its hegemony and the co-constituted unjust power relations it continues to engender (Baker, 2002, 2012; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Daelman et al., 2021; Farley, 2018; Walkerdine, 1993). To the degree that the persistent hegemony of normative developmentalism connotes an evaluative judgement regarding how close or far away someone might be toward being counted as human, the verb becoming in relation to what it means to be human leaves childhood studies mired in the social injustices of racism, classism, ableism and heteropatriarchy that differentially and tangibly impact teaching, learning and researching practices. Instead of eschewing the troubling phrase becoming human, one of my aims in this paper is to sit in the middle of this phrase as a way of inhabiting both the injustices this phrase embodies as well as the paradoxical possibilities of ‘not yet’ the word becoming connotes.

In this sense, perhaps the phrase becoming human is vexing not necessarily due to the usage of the verb becoming but, due to a rather narrow conception of the word human within the hegemony of western onto-epistemologies. In part this paper seeks to wonder about how in disrupting the grip of western onto-epistemologies on what it means to be human we also might consider becoming human both within and against the current socio-cultural moment. In so doing, this paper seeks to contribute to the work in childhood studies by foregrounding research experiences with disabled children ¹ as integral to reimagining our knowledge making and sharing practices. Spyrou (2018) contends that one of the ways to broaden the relevance and significance of childhood studies and its contributions to the necessary work of transforming knowledge production is to invite learning with and from a range of critical disciplines. Therefore, for the purposes of critical reflection on my own research inquiry, I seek to apply concepts from the work of critical disability studies and post-structural feminisms as a way to reconsider and reimagine how we might become human with each other differently. I wonder if the most troublesome part of the phrase becoming human is the ways in which human continues to refer to a heteronormative, white, able-bodied, middle class male figure that other human variations are measured against (Baker, 2002, 2012; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Daelman et al., 2021; Farley, 2018; Walkerdine, 1993). In other words, how might childhood studies contribute to a redefining of what it means to become human and thus confront and resist the hegemonic western version human? How might sitting with and in human becomings provoke knowledge making and sharing practices that embody and embrace encounters and relationships with diverse human embodiments in a manner that not only redefines the human but also redefines our conceptions of childhoods?

In service of this broader aim, I seek to decentre the hegemony of voice as the main medium through which knowledge is made and shared in research. A component part of decentering voice is also questioning the ways in which the use of voice as a form of agency is taken for granted as a criterion in normative human development/becoming human (Alcoff, 2009; MacLure, 2009; Mazzei, 2003, 2007; Mazzei and Jackson, 2012, 2016). Within contemporary schooling practices the hegemony of normative human development works to not only question the inclusion of disabled children within what are still referred to as regular/mainstream classroom spaces but generates the conditions whereby children labeled with intellectual disabilities who prefer non-verbal mediums of communication are outright excluded (Baker, 2002, 2012; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Farley, 2018; Walkerdine, 1993). In my specific context of situating my doctoral ² research within two segregated special needs elementary classrooms, the risks of further contributing to research that has scrutinized, pathologized and exploited the experiences of disabled children and their teachers, remained a primary, unavoidable and inescapable concern throughout my study. For example, several of the disabled children who participated in my research project preferred to communicate in nonverbal or minimally verbal ways. What does the much extolled as well as much critiqued practice of research as an expression of voices who have been historically marginalized mean in this context? What happens when centering voice in research in fact sustains the mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion when voice becomes a performance of the hegemonic discourses of normalcy? Similarly, to what extent is the centering of voice complicit in the (re)centering of the demands of the neoliberal western subject in its aims to sustain its own hegemony? While in the midst of my research relationships with my participants, these questions among several others provoked me to wonder about how to convey my research encounters amidst disabled peoples and disability differently.

By referring to an example from my doctoral research with children labeled and diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, I hope to make a case for the ways that reading silences and silent readings within research are not only necessary but integral to refusing the claims of western colonial logics while also attending to the circulation of power imbalances within research processes. In this sense this paper contests and resists the normative logics that have shaped “notions of children as becomings rather than beings prevailed for much of the 20th century” (Spyrou, 2018: p. 15) while also engaging in the possibilities that through the decentering of this hegemonic normative voice, there are possibilities for new human becomings that embrace disability and disabled childhoods as vital to our learning with and from each other. This paper is composed of three parts. First, I will outline some concepts from the work of post-structural feminist scholarships as well as work from within the field of critical disability studies that make a case for decentering voice and the current normative order of the human. In the second portion of this paper, I will apply the concepts outlined in reading the silences and voices within my own research encounters with participants. Finally, this paper will conclude with an invitation/provocation to reimagine our human becomings outside their current confines.

Reimagining childhoods through reading silences/silent readings

In seeking to de-centre voice and in particular the hegemony of a normative voice, the interpretive methodology that I outline and apply in this paper does not aim to replace one hegemony with another in a manner that sustains the kinds of binaries (i.e. child/adult, ability/disability) that preserve unbalanced relations of power. Rather, one of the aims here is to question, resist and attend to unbalanced relations of power through the making and sharing of knowledge when voices and silences are considered as mutually co-constitutive of each other (Canosa and Graham, 2020; Facca et al., 2020; MacLure, 2009, 2010; Mazzei, 2003, 2007; Mazzei and Jackson, 2012, 2016; Spyrou, 2011, 2015). To put it differently, by examining the ways power circulates between voices and silences, the aim is to mitigate if not remove entirely, the risk of exploitation, misrepresentation and exclusion that far too many research practices sustain in the representation that voices are sufficient in and of themselves as evidence of knowledge produced and shared (Alcoff, 2009; MacLure, 2009). There are numerous stories of harm, stories too numerous to recount here, that research has perpetuated that causes both my hesitation and my intention to tread gently and carefully with both the selection of and representation of the stories recounted in my own research study with disabled children whose mediums of communication predominantly included embodied interactions and gestures as well as the use of pictures and visuals. According to Acker-Verney:

Disability research has a history that includes colonial practices and processes situated in material and geopolitical contexts. As with my experience, people with disabilities have been largely reduced to sources of data by academic researchers and served as test sites for medical intervention in relationships structured by dominance and subjugation. (2016: p. 413–414)

I take Acker-Varney’s (2016) summary of the historical legacies of harm within research inquiry as a provocation to make and share knowledge differently in a manner that foregrounds the contributions of disabled children. Thus, in both practical and conceptual terms attending to the interactions between voices and silences is an interpretive move that seeks to invite, acknowledge and embrace how children and in particular disabled children who prefer non-verbal mediums of communication can, should and do shape knowledge production.

The research inquiry that I critically reflect on in this paper occurred in two segregated special needs classrooms where I engaged in a method of participant observation over a 15-week period that sought to attend to how the demands of normalcy circulated within these spaces while also considering how knowledge was made and shared within and against its hegemonic grasp. My form of participant observation contests the conception of the so-called neutral observer through three interpretive moves that sought to foreground the meanings of embodied encounters while refusing the hegemony of any one voice. First, in making a commitment to attend to small everyday moments, my project also sought to acknowledge and contribute to the work of scholars who manage to de-centre western epistemologies and subjectivities through their work (Davies, 2014; Johansson, 2016; MacLure et al., 2010; Mulcahy, 2012; Sellers, 2010). Silences along with voices convey meanings that both sustain and disrupt what should or might happen under ‘normal’ circumstances within a classroom setting and/or differing contexts/circumstances (MacLure et al., 2010; Mazzei, 2003, 2007; Mazzei and Jackson, 2012; Spyrou, 2015). The work of MacLure et al. (2010) offers an example of the ways silences are read with voices that simultaneously privilege neither and evoke a sense of the relational conundrums that are experienced in both resisting and sustaining the normalizing narrative of schooling. They write about a child’s silence amidst their research as a “breach of etiquette… [a] hole in the ceremonial order of the classroom… a hole in the fabric of the daily routine-a mere four words.” (MacLure et al., 2010: p. 492–493). Silence here is not treated as the absence of voice and thus absence of meaning, rather for MacLure et al. (2010: p. 493), “silence both blocks and produces analysis.” Here voices and silences haunt each other thus producing a nebulous space of questioning both the demand for voice and the demand for silence amidst our encounters as students/teachers/researchers within the classroom. In focusing on an exploration of the uncertainties and possibilities in between voices and silences there is a simultaneous questioning of western modern conception of what it means to be or become human that also shapes our understandings of childhoods. In this sense, what is being questioned here is what Komulainen (2007: p. 23) refers to as the western notion of “voice as an individual property.”

In so doing, this research inquiry engaged in a critical examination of the interplay between voices and silences that also invites a consideration of “the ambiguity and socialness of human communication” (Komulainen (2007: p. 23). Within the context of my inquiry the foregrounding of silence within the work of post-structural/post-qualitative ethnography is also applied as a tool to explore how embodied interactions contribute to meaning making in ways that consider children and in particular disabled children not as mere objects of study but as subjects that are integral to our understanding of our enacted and represented humanities. Several post-qualitative inquiries with children as participants, showcase the important role of embodied encounters, movements and motions in ways that tangibly demonstrate that knowledge formations within childhood, work within and against normative conceptions of human development (Daelman et al., 2021; Davies, 2014; Johansson, 2016; Mulcahy, 2012; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017; Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Nxumalo and Ross, 2019; Sellers, 2010). For example, in mapping children’s play in the early years, Sellers (2010) conveys the significance of everyday interactions between children, their environment as well as other educators, as children participants explore, bend, blur and erode the boundaries of multiple games. Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Sellers (2010: p. 563) states: “Becoming, in this sense, works to disrupt being and identity – these presuming a stable, rational individual – instead conceiving of bodies as constantly changing assemblages of forces.” This insight from Sellers (2010) emphasizes the ways that knowledge making and sharing within the motions and movements of the relational and embodied interaction of children, de-centres both the hegemony of western voice and the unitary subject identity. This focus on embodied knowledges also draws attention to the role of the tenuous binds and bounds that are in-between the childhood formations we think we know. Sellers (2010: p. 566) also states: “The forces of the play(ing), the games and their interrelationships affect and are affected by other play and relationships around them and the physical territory of the setting.” To put it differently, Sellers (2010) insight here conveys both the significance and relevance of exploring how power circulates in-between children’s interactions in ways that attend to the tenuous partialities of everyday encounters in sustaining, contesting and transforming what we think we know about children and childhoods.

I juxtapose these contributions regarding refusing the hegemony of the normative voice and the importance of attending to embodied encounters with concepts from critical disability studies that seek to invite and provoke childhood studies in embracing disability and disabled childhoods (Cocks, 2008; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Daelman et al., 2021; Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2021; Runswick-Cole et al., 2018; Snelgrove, 2005; Wickenden and Kembhavi-Tam, 2014). In a critique that contends much of sociological practice and theorising is ableist, Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2021: p. 4) state: “Disabled people’s politics, arts and their community activism are a necessary antidote to some of the often bland and normative formations found in (non-disabled) sociology.” This insight from Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2021) refuses much of the deficit discourses and stereotypes about disability while simultaneously foregrounding the important and invaluable contributions disabled people make within our communities. In addition to being a provocation and invitation to the field of sociology, by demonstrating the vitality and necessity of disability in the transformation of our knowledge making and sharing practices, Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2021) also provide a necessary encouragement to the field of childhood studies. Elsewhere researchers within the field of critical disability studies and/or disabled childhood studies, have been advocating for and exploring the application of research methods that intend to provide both access and inclusion of disabled children and youth within research (Cocks, 2008; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Daelman et al., 2021; Runswick-Cole et al., 2018; Snelgrove, 2005). For instance, both Cocks (2008) and Snelgrove (2005) engaged in methods of participant observation and small group interactive interviews as mediums of knowledge production for the purposes of assuring increased access and inclusion of disabled children. One of the aims of exploring and enacting research methods that invite divergent and inclusive access points in the making and sharing of knowledge is to simultaneously resist and contest the hegemony and overvaluation of voice in knowledge production while also enriching and revitalizing our understanding of disability and disabled childhoods in transforming what we think we know about childhood/human becomings.

In this section, I have outlined three key elements of an interpretive methodology that entails silent readings/reading silences. One of the goals of this approach is to refuse and contest the hegemony of voice and in particular a normative voice in research practices for the ways in which such practices also sustain unjust relations of power and exclusions in the shaping of what counts as knowledge and who counts as producers of knowledge. Another goal is to foreground the role of embodied knowledge making practices as a strategy of transforming conceptions of becoming human through a reimagining of what it means to be human outside of the narrow western-centric conception of the human. In evoking the possibilities within embodied knowledge making practices the silent readings that are pursued here intend to explore the inter-plays amidst voices and silences that refuses either one, a hegemonic position in knowledge production. Finally, the interpretive methodology outlined here also intends to cultivate increased access and inclusion of disability and disabled childhoods within the much-needed transformative work of reimagining our human becomings in the 21^st century. To put it differently, silent readings/reading silences seeks to contest and question the normative logics that have remained hegemonic, exploitative and unjustly exclusive through the 20^th century while also making and sharing knowledge differently through foregrounding the experiences of disabled children. In the next portion of this paper, I will apply this methodology to an example from my research inquiry.

Reading silences/silent readings and troubling voices with disabled children

I intentionally chose to situate my inquiry within two segregated special needs classrooms because I wanted to examine and explore the ways hegemony of normalcy/normal human development was sustained, questioned and resisted through attending to interactions between disabled children and their teachers. As I mentioned previously, I did not engage in observation through the position/representation of neutrality. Rather, I had pre-existing relationships with the disabled children in these spaces as well as their teachers. These relationships continued well after the formal completion of my research inquiry as I remained connected to both my research sites and continued to cultivate, sustain and learn with and from the disabled children and teachers in these spaces. As a researcher who has taught in segregated classrooms, I offer this contribution as one way to critically examine one aspect of my own complicated entanglements as a teacher and a researcher in the field of elementary education. Elsewhere, I have explored some of the ethical conundrums that are necessarily inescapable within a researching/learning experiences that occur in relationships within classrooms (Karmiris, 2022). To put it differently, the example and analysis I engage in here represents a very small fragment of the ways my participants and I learned with and from each other. The learning that I refer to is understood as encompassing my experiences of the tensions, discomforts and challenges of being situated within the normalizing narrative of schooling in ways that are simultaneously sustained and contested by both teachers and students as well as researchers and participants.

By focusing on the complex entanglement of voices and silences in the normative space of the segregated special needs classroom, the aim is to demonstrate both the challenges and necessities in de-centering western-centric conceptions and practices of childhood becomings. The example that I describe and analyze below is from one of the classes/research sites. All of the students in this class including the two participants Mesan and Nadar (whom I refer to by their pseudonyms) have been diagnosed and labeled with an exceptionality referred to as Mild Intellectual Disability (MID) within my district schools board’s psychology department. I share this small description of the context of my study here, in order to emphasize the ways in which both the disabled children in this segregated space, their teachers and myself are already situated within the discourses and schooling practices of normative human development in a manner that has contributed to the pathologization and exclusion of the disabled children participants in this study. In other words, applying a methodology of silent readings/reading silently encompasses how my research inquiry finds itself in-between a 20^th century version of becoming human that excludes and marginalizes as well as the potentialities of a 21^st century becoming human that embraces the possibilities of learning with and from disabled childhoods.

One example from my research project includes two participants Mesan and Nadar, a clock and a window. One afternoon as soon as I arrive, Mesan takes me by the hand and points to the spot where I will be sitting today that happens to be right beside him. Mesan has just returned from a five-week long trip to Iraq with his family. When I ask Mesan about his trip, he points to the clock and he stretches out his hand to pretend to be a plane. Next, he starts pointing at me, pointing at the window and then pointing at the clock. I am not sure what he is trying to communicate. He very patiently repeats the same motions again. After Mesan’s fourth repetition of the same motions and my fourth apology for not understanding, Nadar says: “He wants you to come outside and play with us at recess. He will tell you then.” Mesan nods in agreement and I thank Nadar for his help. By inviting me out to recess, Mesan and Nadar are perhaps more acutely aware than I am, that if I want to know about Mesan’s trip, recess is the best time to ask and find out. The teacher will be beginning her lesson soon and Mesan and Nadar seem to know that this is not the right time to share his story. This is the teacher’s time and space.

This small example from my research demonstrates the ways power is circulating in-between the interplay of the voices and silences in the interaction between myself and my participants. One such interplay is the hegemonic role of the classroom space in constraining and indeed limiting the kinds of knowledges that can be shared and explored. In this sense, by asking Mesan about his trip at the wrong time and in the wrong place, one of the vulnerabilities here is in the potential trouble of not using class time in ways permitted by the teacher in this moment. This bad timing on my part also foregrounds the ways that Nadar and Mesan have come to read the classroom they inhabit as a place where they remain exposed to the trouble of telling stories that they seem to know are out of place in this space at this time. As students who anticipate the time when recess will begin, pointing to the clock and pointing to the window where the playground is in full view, is commonsensical to Mesan and Nadar. Nadar and Mesan do not need words to mediate the meaning of this non-verbal exchange. The teacher has not yet spoken to us. Yet, her very presence in the teacher’s chair as students settle into their spots for the lesson is enough for Mesan and Nadar to redirect my attention to the clock and the openings the window offers as a possibility of continuing our conversation elsewhere. The anticipation of the teacher’s voice and the ways in which she will direct and shape the learning in this time and space, limit and constrain this interaction with my participants through her mere presence in her chair.

In attending to the ways in which Mesan and Nadar convey that the sharing of their stories is out of place, there are fruitful opportunities here to explore and examine how the socio-cultural context of schooling sustains the conditions of exclusion through the overvaluation given to the teacher’s voice. As Mesan motions towards the clock, I also wonder about the outsize role of the clock’s circular motion. What is the role of this quite common object in generating the conditions that there is no time in this space for his story because this time is reserved for the teacher? The clock is part of the interplay and interaction that creates the boundaries of exclusion wherein Mesan and Nadar invite me outdoors for recess to learn about his trip. Here the work of Daelman et al. (2021) in tracing the borders of exclusion as they are configured in school contexts serves as a reminder of the need to attend to the interplay between voices and silences within everyday lives of children as integral to the work of transforming research practices in order to cultivate new understandings of childhoods. Through infusing their work with concepts and ideas from critical disability studies scholars such as Margaret Shildrick, Daelman et al. (2021: p. 594) foreground the potentialities of research with children that “is about relationality and entanglements, about how children behave towards each other, about how they position themselves relationally, about how they ‘become-in-the-world-with-others.’” To put it differently, this insight from Daelman et al. (2021) offers a provocation to engage in the kinds of research inquiries that explore how children navigate and interact with each other in times and places where the hegemonic voice of normalcy is omni-present even in the motion of the classroom clock.

In showcasing the interplay within voices and silences through my interaction with Mesan and Nadar, I am also exploring the ways in which we are in between different kinds of world making. First, there are the ways in which both Mesan and Nadar express and awareness of being constrained by the normative demands of the classroom. It is a classroom that does not have time for the non-verbal gestures that Mesan uses as his predominant medium of communication, while simultaneously expecting silence in anticipation of the teacher’s voice. Within this context, one version of world making that is occurring here seems intent on preserving and sustaining a hegemony of normative childhood developmentalism that also sustains the kinds of conditional inclusions or outright exclusions that both Mesan and Nadar appear quite familiar with. There is no time for either verbal and/or non-verbal mediums of communication for conveying what they know through their embodied experiences. Inclusion in this classroom space, in this moment and time requires a silencing of what they can or might share. Yet, even as this version of world making is inhabited, there are also gestures towards the ways Mesan, Nadar and myself are inhabiting the possibility of another world making effort too. Mesan will not let go of his gestures towards me, the clock and the window in a manner that reveals his desire to communicate and connect with others through his own embodied way of knowing and being in the world. I wonder if Nadar had not been there in that moment in order to interact with his friend’s gestures and then mediate their meaning, if I would have missed Mesan’s invitation to inhabit the world differently with him and Nadar? Engaging in research inquiry in-between a world that seeks to silence/exclude disabled children even as those very same disabled children are cultivating their own world making strategies is also to embody knowledge making and sharing practices as always and already tenuous and partial.

One of the risks of situating knowledge making and sharing practices within the potentialities of what is tenuous and partial is the inadvertent and/or intentional reinforcement of stereotypes and assumptions about disabled childhoods that current hegemonic conceptions of normal human development take for granted as real. As an elementary school teacher, I have been embedded in these kinds of representations of disability as something that requires rehabilitation, cure and/or management in ways that continue to misrepresent disabled children, youth and adults through negative and deficit pathologies. I wonder about the risks in reinforcing discourses and practices of human developmentalism in ways that sustain practices of conditional exclusion and/or outright exclusion. These risks and the social injustices sustained through them are quite real as is represented by the ongoing practices of labeling and diagnosing children in order to segregate them from their peers. This is one of the reasons why I am inclined to accept the invitation that Mesan generously repeats four times and Nadar kindly mediates. In their own efforts to mitigate power imbalances in research inquiry while taking steps to assure the accessibility and inclusivity in research, Daelman et al. (2021) consider the importance of becoming followers. Daelman et al. (2021: p. 594) state: “we let the children be our guide. We followed the children’s lead towards places at school that were important or meaningful to them—where they belong—and listened to the experiences and stories they shared.” The seemingly passive act of following along has potential here for a couple of reasons. First, there is a mitigation of the power imbalances that occur through the concession that participants have their own world making strategies that we might learn with and from. Second, in actively choosing to follow, there is an opportunity to attend to the interdependencies in knowledge formations in the interplay between following and leading. In this sense, as Mesan gestures towards what is outside the segregated classroom and its reinforcement of normative childhood, there is a limit placed on following the lead of the teacher’s voice. Mesan silently gestures to the possibilities of following/leading knowledges being made and shared within and against the hegemonic demands of normalcy’s voice in schooling practices.

Before following Mesan and Nadar outside to play at recess, it is also important to consider that in the meantime, we each take our spot on the carpet in front of the teacher’s chair as she moves through her lesson. Mesan, Nadar and I follow along silently as the teacher’s voice fills the classroom. To put it differently, choosing to follow along as participants lead, through either their voices and/or their silences, is not showcased here as a solution to the troubling work of knowledge production. Rather, attending to the implications of following/leading is placed in the foreground here as a way to amplify the attendant uncertainties that shape the contours of the kinds of knowledges made and shared in becoming human with participants. As I sit on the carpet in silence, I notice how the previously animated gestures from Mesan and the excitement expressed in Nadar’s voice have been replaced by crossed legs, facing forward with quiet hands. In tracing the interplay between voices and silences, the shift in participant demeanor through pauses, verbal tone, stutters, or a change in topic, has been explored by other researchers as indicative of the complex situational entanglements that impact knowledge formations and representations (Alcoff, 2009; MacLure, 2009; Mazzei, 2003, 2007; Mazzei and Jackson, 2012, 2016). In the context of my research inquiry, I am left wondering about the limits in choosing to follow participants along when that following merely returns to the privileging of a normative voice and the unjust silences it sustains. I also wonder about the degree to which pausing and questioning participant contributions to knowledge making both works to erode and simultaneously preserve unbalanced relations of power within research inquiry. Reading Mesan’s and Nadar’s silences in this instance leaves me in the middle of the troublesome possibility of sustaining unjust practices even as I seek to resist and refuse them.

Concluding thoughts

In applying an interpretive methodology that entails reading silences/silent readings, one of the key aims of this paper has been to explore knowledge production with and through the foregrounding of disabled children’s experiences. This work has engaged in a critical analysis of embodied forms of expression and knowledge making as a way to cultivate access and inclusion to research processes that have been historically exclusive. By both questioning and refusing hegemonic norms and voices, I have also tried to trace the ways an adherence to developmental discourses and practices within classrooms continue to exclude the vibrant contributions of disabled children to knowledge making and sharing processes. Thus, in following the lead of disabled children, the enactment of an interpretive methodology of reading silences and silent readings has explored the ways in which de-centering a western colonial normative voice is mired in challenges, limitations and possibilities. The challenges include finding ways to contest and resist the seemingly unbounded and unchecked power of normalcy as represented in the silent presence of the classroom clock and the teacher’s voice. In this sense, mitigating the injustices of power imbalances is also an invitation to disrupt the hegemony of any one voice. Through a critical examination of the silences that refuse new childhood becomings while also attending to the silent gestures, movements and motions that invite learning with and from disability as vital to new world making, reading silences and silent readings has intended to expose and examine the necessary limits of voice and in particular the demands of a western hegemonic voice to become normal.

Similarly, in evoking the work of critical disability studies scholars alongside post-structural research methodologies, an additional aim of this paper has been to contribute to childhood studies by provoking a reconsideration and reimagining of becoming childhoods that embrace disability and disabled children as integral. One way to characterize the provocation of this paper might be as “an ontology of decentred human and non-human becoming…which rests on the open-ended possibilities offered by a world in motion and flux which invites experimentation and the imagination” (Spyrou, 2018: p.204). This insight from Spyrou (2018) serves as a reminder that engaging in knowledge production is an invitation to contest the kinds of onto-epistemological boundaries that seek to discount and dehumanize childhood becomings in ways that sustain unjust relations of power. In becoming human with Mesan and Nadar, through the voices and silences we inhabit, there are potentialities in encountering and contesting the injustices disabled children experience while also embracing the hope in the human reimagining yet to come.