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This article critically reads a social encounter in which a social worker and a middle-aged man with learning disabilities are implicated. To do so, I draw upon ideas and approaches associated with anthropology and the sociology of everyday life to expose invisible, or invisibilised, dimensions of social interaction which may, otherwise, be obscured, backgrounded, and perhaps even concealed by virtue of their 'thereness'. Through the prisms afforded by these disciplinary lenses, a seemingly ordinary, and unspectacular, social encounter may be regarded in the context of everyday life alongside learning disability, as registering/generating multiple forms of language, and as being inescapably saturated in multifaceted forms of power. Because these disciplinary tools may help map not only the particular social encounter to which this article is concerned but also social interactions more generally, they constitute useful resources, to be cultivated, or crafted, for ethical social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an exploratory qualitative research project conducted in Hong Kong. This investigated accounts of place-based exclusions, especially focusing upon the tactics disabled people and their families deploy to cope with exclusionary places and practice. I elaborate upon three thematic clusters emerging from group interviews. The first addresses place-oriented decision making. The second explores the emotional geographies that specific socio-spatial orders register and generate. Finally, I assess how far participants' spatial tactics and stories may be regarded as either subversive or transformative. While participants' practice often maintains disabling geographies, their spatial tactics also 'speaks' against congratulatory accounts of social inclusion. However, participants' accounts of harrowing place-based discriminations register the extent and magnitude of barriers which combine to constitute the disabling conditions in which their spatial tactics/stories take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract \nPoints of interest This article explores written narratives produced by two ‘abled’ people about a social encounter, or event, with a ‘disabled’ person in an inland Chinese city. To interpret these, I draw upon principles and approaches associated with narrative inquiry, critical disability studies and geographies of disability. I identify the structural elements, sequentiality, and themes (e.g. fear, pity and especially anxiety, or perplexity) permeating these narratives as well as their lack of resolution, or closure. Later, I situate these narratives within wider discursive contexts albeit while emphasising how perplexity emerges through a lack of identity, or rupture, between words and the world. These troubling and perplexing narratives register the fragility of symbolic systems and the troubled subject positions these enable/disable. Nevertheless, and crucially, these narratives also trouble the taken-for-grantedness of ostensibly stable abled/disabled categories, persons, and objects, in ways which may permit realisation of things outside reductive hierarchical binaries. This article presents insights into how ‘abled’ people reflect upon, and narrate, social encounters with ‘disabled’ people. To do so, I draw upon two written accounts referring to events in and around two inland Chinese cities. Powerful yet simplistic ways of thinking about ability and disability which are grounded in language, society and culture shaped how participants saw and made sense of the disabled people they encountered. Participants also felt a mismatch between the ways they had been taught to think about ability and disability and how these ‘things’ appeared through the social encounter. Consequently, participants seemed to experience symptoms resembling definitions of anxiety. These anxieties are productive. They emerge when people begin to perceive the imprecision, and limits, of categories like self and other and ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’. In this article, I try to show potential for conversation, and dialogue, between not only narrative inquiry, critical disability studies and geographies of disability but also ‘ability’ and ‘disability’. This article presents insights into how ‘abled’ people reflect upon, and narrate, social encounters with ‘disabled’ people. To do so, I draw upon two written accounts referring to events in and around two inland Chinese cities.Powerful yet simplistic ways of thinking about ability and disability which are grounded in language, society and culture shaped how participants saw and made sense of the disabled people they encountered.Participants also felt a mismatch between the ways they had been taught to think about ability and disability and how these ‘things’ appeared through the social encounter. Consequently, participants seemed to experience symptoms resembling definitions of anxiety.These anxieties are productive. They emerge when people begin to perceive the imprecision, and limits, of categories like self and other and ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’.In this article, I try to show potential for conversation, and dialogue, between not only narrative inquiry, critical disability studies and geographies of disability but also ‘ability’ and ‘disability’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon ethnographic research, this article explores undergraduate students' experiences at a normal university in Shanghai focusing on the types of identities and forms of sociality emerging therein. Although students' symptoms of disappointment seem to indicate the power of university experiences to extinguish purposeful action, this article suggests they are associated with students' identity work, central to which are attempts to cope with disintegrations to school-related identities and efforts to construct alternate senses of self.

This article critically reads a Personal Independence Payment Claim Form. All agents implicated in this form (e.g. the Department of Work and Pensions, assessors, an Office Manager and health professionals) are contemplated although of central concern is the positioning of claimants—or the persons filling in the form on their behalf—and social workers, and the constructions of social work practice resulting from such positioning. This article investigates discourse in the form itself, the discourse claimants are obliged to supplement and the discursive formations this text registers/generates. To read this form, I distinguish between overt, declarative and manifest content and the covert, descriptive, latent, perhaps unintentional but violent content, accessing the latter through a symptomatic reading, which draws upon my interpretation of principles associated with deconstruction, critical discourse analysis, decentering and positioning. Conceiving of PIP-related practice as possessing the dynamic qualities of an 'episode', this article argues that although the text provides help with costs, a corollary or side-effect, is that claimants and social workers are made to inhabit problematic positions within discourse/practice. Textual analysis may, nevertheless, unsettle, and re/position and de/re/construct relations, thereby decentering institutionalised ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the diverse semiotic landscapes which may be experienced as a consequence of apparently mundane rides taken upon the Shanghai metro. I first present, and then untangle, the ideological discourses that form, clash and, at times, collapse during these journeys. In order to elaborate upon the composition of these signs, they are viewed from multiple perspectives, although significant reference is made to Roland Barthes’ punctum/studium dialectic. These signs are not only read as manifestations of robust ideology but also as indeterminate, and fragile. This article is also concerned with pragmatics on the Shanghai metro, or the relationships between people and signs, and illustrates how passengers perform within this semiotically charged environment in ways which, sometimes, undo, or subvert, urban rationality. Although this article specifically focuses upon the Shanghai metro, and one particular route in its parliament of lines, it is intended these observations not only inform but also are informed by accounts of social spaces beyond these limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a filmic portrayal of issues relating to autism in a Chinese context, using this as a prism through which to consider how meanings associated with disability in general, and the autistic spectrum in particular, are produced. Instead of perpetuating a reductive positive/negative approach to representation, the article focuses on the fluid and dynamic ways in which author and audience co-produce texts relating to disability in ways which are invariably influenced by, and reproducing of, specific socio-cultural and discursive circumstances. Meaning-making in relation to disability is, however, ongoing and there is potential to realize disability differently. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]