Making friends and fitting in: a social-relational understanding of disability at school

In this article, I extend the growing literature on education spaces by examining disabled young people's possibilities for sociality in mainstream and specialist high schools in the UK, focusing on visually impaired (VI) young people's narratives of bullying, friendship and their complex relationships with carers and support workers. By using stories from both mainstream and specialist schools, the research is able to compare how young people's agency comes up against the power of disablism in different school spaces and the impact of this interplay on VI young people's relationships at school. A focus on sociality recognizes how highly young people value their social lives at school and that school sociality is a powerful indicator of future inclusion. Theoretically, I offer new insight on spatiality within a relational understanding of disability, arguing that school is a key site where discourses of disablism and youth agency intersect.