Unflattening’ Disabled Children’s Childhoods: Social Fiction as an Ethical Methodology for Exploring Neurodiversity in Educational Spaces

This paper presents a methodological reflection on the use of social fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods. I argue there is a critical need for new ways of exploring the lived experiences of neurodivergent and disabled children to complicate ‘flat’ understandings that deny the embodied, affective, socio-spatially mediated experience of school life. I do this by making a case for social fictions as an ethical methodology and reflecting on techniques I used in developing a short story social fiction. I make the case for why and how fiction-based methods destabilise dominant ways of knowing, seeing, teaching, and intervening with disabled children. I conclude by offering a series of ‘what if’ questions about the future development of social fiction as a methodology in Disability Studies in Education, one which brings greater nuance and a sense of three-dimensionality to understandings of neurodivergent bodies and minds in school spaces.