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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.

Sec. Medical Sociology

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1560701

This article is part of the Research Topic Novel Sociological Methods and Practices of Engagement across Disability Communities View all 4 articles

Narrative portraits: Affirmative approaches to understanding learning disability in the everyday

Provisionally accepted
  • The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Narrative portraits provide an opportunity to uncover new affirmative understandings of disability and family through the focus on lived experiences. This article will explore how a critical disability studies lens helps us to understand narrative approaches and the crip potentials of narrative portraits. Considering the 'joy deficit' within disability research (Sunderland et al, 2009;Shuster and Westbrook, 2022), this paper highlights the disruptive potential narrative portraits bring to family sociology and disability studies. This paper presents a narrative portrait as a case study, taken from research carried out with 14 siblings of people with learning disabilities from the UK. This is used to explore how siblings of people with learning disabilities understand disability in the everyday with a focus on the affirmative and disruptive counter-narrative nature of the portrait. Through this, the potential for counter-narratives within this methodology will be made clear with the unique nature of sibling relationships central to this. Narrative inquiry can challenge dominant deficit understandings of disability through narrative repair. Narrative portraits take this further through the focus on participant's words in long form allowing their viewpoints to be centred. This approach lends itself to studies of the everyday through the space afforded for deeper, nuanced accounts of life. The approach crips more classic narrative research methods through challenging normative understandings of the researcher's role in favour of a more participant centred approach to analysis. In doing so, there is potential to imagine more inclusive scholarship. When addressed through a disability lens, narrative portraiture uncovers lived experiences of disability, how disability is navigated in families and how siblings negotiate disability in their relationships allowing the nuances of everyday experiences of disability to arise.

    Keywords: Learning Disability, Narrative portraits, Everyday Sociology, qualitative research, narrative inquiry

    Received: 14 Jan 2025; Accepted: 17 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Ryan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Tom Ryan, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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