Learning Disability and Everyday Life

Reviews / Votes

"Learning Disability and Everyday Life concerns autism, but the word does not appear in the book title. There is a reason for that, as it becomes clear by reading. Alex Cockain is critical towards pre-given categories; he is aware of the power of language, and he tries to open a narrative space of encounter challenging the assumptions, postures and stereotypes which accompany autistic and disabled persons. Of course, as the Author discusses with much reflexivity, there are limits in his strategy, as with every experiment. Still, it poses a problem, challenges conventions, and allows reconfiguration and renegotiation. So, the title refers to 'learning disability', together with 'everyday life'. On the one hand, focusing on the rhythms and practices of the everyday means paying attention to the scrutiny of the small and the ordinary, including practices like eating, walking or sleeping. But clearly, the small and the ordinary are not meaningless; quite the contrary, the everyday is political and allows access to the broader world of disability."

Alberto Vanolo (12 Aug 2024): Learning Disability and Everyday Life, Disability & Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2024.2391612

"Learning Disability and Everyday Life offers an account of Alex Cockain's life with his brother Paul. Paul is a middle-aged man who has labels of autism and learning disability. The account is ethnographic in texture, and Cockain draws on an impressive array of theory relevant to disability studies including anthropology, sociology, linguistics, phenomenology and a good deal more. He also makes liberal use of disability studies literature in advancing his analysis and arguments. The book shows how apparently mundane moments and practices in Alex and Paul's everyday lives are produced by the hegemonic forces which saturate our social world: D/discourses, power relations, normalcy, ableism and disablism, and so on. In other words, all the usual suspects are here, and they are used to illuminate not just Alex and Paul's everyday lives, but the ways in which other people including neighbours, doctors, and Government bureaucrats respond to autism and learning disability, and people who carry such labels, in their everyday lives.
Ultimately, this book offers a uniquely detailed, textured, erudite and theoretically sophisticated ethnographic case study of two people's everyday lives, and how they are shaped bylearning disability and the sociocultural processes and possibilities that attend it."

Dr. Owen Barden, Review of Learning Disability and Everyday Life in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 14.1 (April 2025)