Affective economies, autism, and ‘challenging behaviour’: socio-spatial emotions in disabled children’s education

This paper tells a story of a small action in a fleeting moment in a morning spent in a UK special school classroom with Molly, a child with an autism diagnosis. It brings the socio-politically active sphere of Critical Disability Studies (Goodley, 2014; Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Titchkosky and Michalko, 2012; Shildrick, 2012; Titchkosky 2011) and more recently, the emergent Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies (Runswick-Cole, Curran and Liddiard, 2017; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2013) in to conversation with emotional geographies in education (Kenway and Youdell, 2011). This paper rejects the pathologising of disabled children’s emotions as symptoms of disorder and instead reorientates our gaze towards emotions as socio-spatially mediated in the subjectification of children in school spaces. It does this by drawing together the theoretical tools of Ahmed’s affective economies (2004a; 2004b) to explore the interventions in the everyday lives of disabled school children. Ahmed’s affective economies are put to work to explore the emotions produced, reproduced and resisted between bodies in disabled children’s schooling. Through such a reorientation we can explore how the subjectivation of children labelled with Special Educational Needs or Disability (SEND) becomes between bodies rather than residing within an individual child’s pathology or psychology.