Professor Sarah Dauncey has been awarded a 36-month Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship worth £193,672, starting in September 2024, to explore “Emotional Subjects: Disability, Para-citizenship and Emotions in China”.
Building on her previous extensive work in China on disability and citizenship – a dynamic relationship she termed ‘para-citizenship’ – Professor Dauncey will explore the ways in which emotions may be just as fundamental to the ways in which disabled people in China experience citizenship as structural or individual factors.
She will examine the various roles emotions play in mobilising the engagement of disabled and non-disabled people with the values and processes of para-citizenship in China; the ways in which disabled people themselves feel about and react to those discourses of belonging and exclusion in the particular realms of bio-medical citizenship, economic citizenship, socio-cultural citizenship, and intimate citizenship; as well as the relationship between prevalent emotional attitudes toward people with impairments and the disablement of people with a wide variety of impairment types.
A better understanding of the emotional-affective element of para-citizenship will, it is hoped, contribute to the development of a society (in China, but potentially more broadly too) that better recognises the rights of disabled people as equals and enables them to play as full a role as possible in all areas of our collective life.
Posted on Tuesday 12th December 2023