The Playground Model of Disability - David Bolton

More than being counter to what we must surely endeavour to consider the status quo of honesty, not to mention the pursuit of truth that should still be fundamental in academia and education more broadly, dishonesty involves deceit and thus victimisation, which is to say it tends to be used either against someone or to give someone an unfair advantage. Such personal interactions are sometimes and, in the context of this book, revealingly referred to as the games people play. When an unfair advantage is so given, someone else tends to be disadvantaged, an aspect of dishonesty that resonates with disablement. This book coins the term dis/honesty to define the many moments in which dishonesty is invoked by disability, and vice versa. The concept is explored via a selection of contemporary British sociocultural representations – namely, short jokes, disability sitcom, soap opera, activist radio interviews, fictionalised observations, and the robotic positionality of Artificial Intelligence. In investigating these representations of dis/honesty, on the basis that the blueprint of adult behaviour is found in the schoolyard, playground figurations are posited as part of the autocritical framework. Remarkably, there are many such relationships with disablement, for intrinsic to Piggy in the Middle, Leapfrog, Pile On, Hide and Seek, Blind Man’s Bluff, and Robot Tick, among other playground games, is interpersonal inequity, whereby a normative position is juxtaposed w
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