Date of Award

5-12-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Cultural Foundations of Education

Advisor(s)

Beth Ferri

Keywords

arts-based research;autoethnography;narrative identity;sibling disability

Subject Categories

Disability Studies | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

This exploration into how sibling disability impacts identity utilizes qualitative, arts-based methodologies to generate data and situates this knowledge in an examination of other text-based and visually-based sibling memoirs. I rely on autoethnographic techniques with photography, assemblage and photo-elicitation using family photographs and medical images to explore my narrative identity and how my sister’s impairments and disability have impacted that. Five themes became crystalized as I recursively examined the data, led by the most expansive finding that sibling disability can create an epistemology or unique way of knowing that is different from other examples of embodied knowledge. Qualities of this knowledge include emergent themes of interdependence and how my sibling relationship has worked to construct my identity. I also discovered that my position in space and time has been greatly impacted by sibling disability and that the ways that I occupy the world are related to my specific lived experience as a sibling of a person with impairments. The fifth theme gleaned from this project is the most outward facing, as I expose myths about disability and productivity and attempt to unravel the presumptions about these in my own thinking as well as what popular culture presents as truth.

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Open Access

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