Harriet Cooper is currently Senior Research Associate in Health and Medical Humanities at the University of East Anglia, UK. Having worked across both critical disability studies and health sociology, she is interested in how (inter)disciplinarity imagines itself and polices its operations, as well as in the ways in which concepts of inclusivity, involvement and democracy animate and shape academic agendas. The themes of disability and emancipation connect all of Harriet’s work to date, yet as a methodologist she continues to be irked by the question of how best to combine academia and activism.

• Introduction; 1. The look which made me: The early gazing relationship and the construction of disabled subjectivity; 2. Making her better? Denaturalising the notion of the ‘developing child’; 3. (Un)making the child, making the future: On gifts, commodities and diagnostic speech acts; 4. Making, unmaking, remaking? Finding a position from which to resist; Conclusion.

Harriet Cooper is currently Senior Research Associate in Health and Medical Humanities at the University of East Anglia, UK. Having worked across both critical disability studies and health sociology, she is interested in how (inter)disciplinarity imagines itself and polices its operations, as well as in the ways in which concepts of inclusivity, involvement and democracy animate and shape academic agendas. The themes of disability and emancipation connect all of Harriet’s work to date, yet as a methodologist she continues to be irked by the question of how best to combine academia and activism.

• Introduction; 1. The look which made me: The early gazing relationship and the construction of disabled subjectivity; 2. Making her better? Denaturalising the notion of the ‘developing child’; 3. (Un)making the child, making the future: On gifts, commodities and diagnostic speech acts; 4. Making, unmaking, remaking? Finding a position from which to resist; Conclusion.

Harriet Cooper is currently Senior Research Associate in Health and Medical Humanities at the University of East Anglia, UK. Having worked across both critical disability studies and health sociology, she is interested in how (inter)disciplinarity imagines itself and polices its operations, as well as in the ways in which concepts of inclusivity, involvement and democracy animate and shape academic agendas. The themes of disability and emancipation connect all of Harriet’s work to date, yet as a methodologist she continues to be irked by the question of how best to combine academia and activism.

• Introduction; 1. The look which made me: The early gazing relationship and the construction of disabled subjectivity; 2. Making her better? Denaturalising the notion of the ‘developing child’; 3. (Un)making the child, making the future: On gifts, commodities and diagnostic speech acts; 4. Making, unmaking, remaking? Finding a position from which to resist; Conclusion.