Austerity Fictions: Disability, Class and Resistance in Twenty-First Century British

My interest in contemporary representations of disability and class in austerity Britain
has stemmed from previous research in the field of cultural disability studies. In my
undergraduate dissertation Towards a progressive representation of disability:
challenging normalcy and ableism, and research masters thesis Challenging ableist
perceptions of disability and cure through contemporary cultural narratives, I
analysed texts through a 'disability optic' (Davidson, 2006, p.126), exploring the
myriad ways misrepresentation interacts with embedded ableist assumptions and
charting the possibilities of moving towards a progressive representation of disability.
Building on this, I argued that literature and film creates a platform for resisting
ableism and providing alternative representations. As Mitchel and Snyder write in
their foundational text Narrative Prosthesis, literature can be 'a unique space for
contemplating the complexity of physical and cognitive differences that is absent
from nearly every other discursive space' (2000, p.166).
In line with my previous approach, I intend to analyse contemporary
representations of disability whilst engaging with the social and political context in
which disabled people live. After a decade of austerity, imposed in the wake of the
2008 global financial crisis, this research is a necessary response to the systematic
attack on public services and welfare reforms that has lead to poverty and death for
millions of disabled people living in Britain. In Crip Times: Disability, Globalisation,
and Resistance, Robert McRuer writes that 'most studies of austerity (...) have noted
neither disability's centrality to a global austerity politics nor the nuanced ways (...)
that disability might serve as a site from which to understand and resist that politics'
(2018, p.13). I hope to address this gap in the current understanding with a particular
focus on the UK, which has been 'ground zero for austerity since the early 2000s'
(McRuer, 2018, p.24).