Memoir as Counter Narrative: using creative nonfiction to explore visual impairment and mental illness and challenge dominant models of disability

This practice research project will produce a memoir exploring Caroline's lived experience of mental ill health and visual impairment. It will be an original contribution to, and intervention in, debates surrounding disability and the taboos of articulating mental and physical ill health. Caroline will use creative nonfiction to produce a counter narrative that challenges the inadequacy of dominant models of disability. This work will contribute to the public 'OwnVoices' debate aiming to diversify storytelling by sharing the lived experience of minority groups, and the disabled movement's rallying cry "nothing about us without us" (Charlton, 1998). The accompanying critical commentary will explore the resources creative nonfiction offers as a vehicle for raising public awareness through first person narration.