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This paper explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: what does it mean to be human in the 21 st Century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by BraidottiÕs posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of BraidottiÕs themes in relation to disability: I. Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; II. Life beyond the species:Rethinking animal; III. Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human whilst celebrating moments of difference and disruption i . This quote kick-starts Rosi BraidottiÕs text and initiates a key task of her book: to target/secure the problem/possibility of the post/human. The human, as it is classically understood, is a self-aggrandising, abstract ideal and symbol of classical humanity that was born in Europe Ôpredicated on eighteenth and nineteenth-century renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance idealsÕ (Ibid: 13) and shaped, more recently, through modernist and capitalist mouldings. ÔHumanityÕ Braidotti (2013: 24) notes, Ôis very much a male of the species: it is a heÕ. Moreover, Ôhe is white, European, handsome and able-bodiedÕ (Braidotti, 2013: 24), Ôan ideal of bodily perfectionÕ (Ibid: 13), Ôimplicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognised polityÕ (Ibid: 65), Ôa rational animal endowed with languageÕ (Ibid: 141). This means that while all citizens are humans Ôsome or

This paper draws on the narratives of parents of disabled babies in order to conceptualise notions of enabling care. This analysis emerges from the Sheffield site of an ESRC research project Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies: Identifying Enabling Care , which brings together the Universities of Sheffield and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The linear heroic narrative is a dominant theme within Western culture. It is competitive and individualistic and tends to be futureorientated in that actions conducted in the present are evaluated according to later outcomes. This linear narrative places much store on modernist interventions such as medicine, and tends to uphold professional boundaries and hierarchies. In the lifeworlds of parents, usually mothers, of disabled babies, this narrative can reinforce disempowering interpretations of disability and impairment. On the basis of 25 in-depth interviews, accompanying stories and ethnographic data, this paper suggests that parents are developing counternarratives which, at times, resist linear life models and free parents to enjoy their children as they are. If life is perceived as an open book rather than as a concluding chapter, parents are able to develop stories that are neither linear nor heroic but present and becoming.

This article posits a number of provocations for scholars and researchers engaged with Critical Disability Studies. We summarise some of the analytical twists and turns occurring over the last few years that create a number of questions and concerns. We begin by introducing Critical Disability Studies; describing it as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship building on foundational disability studies theories. Critical Disability Studies scholarship is being produced at an exponential rate and we assert that we need to take pause for thought. We lay out five provocations to encourage reflection and debate: what is the purpose of Critical Disability Studies; how inclusive is Critical Disability Studies; is disability the object or subject of studies; what matters or gets said about disability; and how can we attend to disability and ability? We conclude by making a case for a reflexive and politicised Critical Disability Studies.

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