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

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My interest in contemporary representations of disability and class in austerity Britainhas stemmed from previous research in the field of cultural disability studies. In myundergraduate dissertation Towards a progressive representation of disability:challenging normalcy and ableism, and research masters thesis Challenging ableistperceptions of disability and cure through contemporary cultural narratives, Ianalysed texts through a 'disability optic' (Davidson, 2006, p.126), exploring themyriad ways misrepresentation interacts with embedded ableist assumptions andcharting the possibilities of moving towards a progressive representation of disability.Building on this, I argued that literature and film creates a platform for resistingableism and providing alternative representations. As Mitchel and Snyder write intheir foundational text Narrative Prosthesis, literature can be 'a unique space forcontemplating the complexity of physical and cognitive differences that is absentfrom nearly every other discursive space' (2000, p.166).In line with my previous approach, I intend to analyse contemporaryrepresentations of disability whilst engaging with the social and political context inwhich disabled people live. After a decade of austerity, imposed in the wake of the2008 global financial crisis, this research is a necessary response to the systematicattack on public services and welfare reforms that has lead to poverty and death formillions of disabled people living in Britain. In Crip Times: Disability, Globalisation,and Resistance, Robert McRuer writes that 'most studies of austerity (...) have notedneither 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 particularfocus on the UK, which has been 'ground zero for austerity since the early 2000s'(McRuer, 2018, p.24).