Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have faced continual barriers to achieving social inclusion within their communities and are often excluded from many avenues of community life. While segregated institutionalized living—and the social exclusion associated with it—has declined, individuals with IDD continue to face barriers to achieving social inclusion linked to restrictions placed upon them that inhibit opportunities to obtain meaningful paid employment. One of the first steps necessary to pursue employment opportunities is a coherent, effective and professional curriculum vitae (CV). For individuals with IDD, preparing and using a traditional text-based CV may be unrealistic. Therefore, the goal of this thesis was to equip a sample of young adults with IDD with a visual photograph-based CV and to help them practice using it in an interview. This thesis used photovoice narrative in order to visually document the strengths and skills that a person with IDD could offer to a potential employer through the communication tool of a visual CV. By engaging participants in producing and using a visual CV, this research project explored options for increasing channels of communication between prospective employees and employers in hopes of encouraging inclusion of people with IDD in Canadian labour markets.

Including all students through the educative processes is instrumental to their success. Each student's journey through education is therefore impacted by the ways they are included in the classroom. As such, social inclusion, and academic inclusion underpinned by a general sense of belonging are key elements impacting students' successes in schooling. Both globally and nationally school systems face challenges in enacting policies, pedagogies, and practices to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations. Student voice which has historically been absent from the literature can be a valuable tool in accounting for the lived experiences of diverse students with or without a formal label of dis/ability. Student voice can (re)present a revelatory tool that can be acted upon in responding to these diverse needs. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore how secondary students in Grenada with or without a label of learning dis/ability but who are considered as part of responsive inclusive education, experience a sense of belonging through academic and social inclusion. This qualitative study using critical narrative inquiry pursued through semi-structured interviews with students, their teachers and parents revealed resonant threads of strained responsive education, childism and coloniality, the pedagogy of nice and an elusive inclusive education. Recommendations are therefore made to center student voice and choice, further the decolonization of schooling, create improved systems of evaluation and diagnosis of specific learning challenges, and to provide extensive teacher training so that the needs of diverse learners can be met. The findings have the potential to encourage and introduce collaborative educational practices amongst teacher-practitioners, students, and Grenada's Ministry of Education and thereby improve responsive models for secondary learners of diverse abilities.

This thesis is a phenomenological study that has been carried out via two semi-structured interviews with an -  in conventional ways of categorising - 22 years old white, heterosexual, and middleclass Swedish woman, referred to as “Andrea”. The thesis aims to explore the becomings of Andrea in connection with cosmetic body modifications and her experiences in relation to this of fitting and misfitting, which are related to the dis/ability system. The aim of this thesis has also been to situate her as an embodied female subject in an intersectional context, in addition to her own experiences, as multiple social categorizations intra-act in the creation of dis/ability. The thesis takes its point of departure in Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of nomadic subjectivity and employs her notion of subjectivity as a negotiation between desire and power, with the goal of analysing the affirmative potential of cosmetic body modifications, as well as being critical towards them and their effects. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concepts of fitting/misfitting are used in order to analyse the intra-actions between body and environment as well as how cosmetic body modifications affect the fit and/or misfit of Andrea.  Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation has been employed in relation to this, with the aim of showing how beauty, whiteness, femininity, and economic wealth are produced and sustained. In the thesis it is analysed how Andrea, in complex ways desires molarity at the same time as she actively resists “fixed” positionings of her. Andrea contributes to a deconstruction of the fixity of molar identity as her resistance disrupts the flow of expected behaviors - something which creates moments of imperceptibility. The thesis furthermore argues that Andrea uses cosmetic body modifications as an affirmative deconstruction of power in addition to it being a force that drives her towards the desired molarity.

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Ranging from the late 1880s to the late 1970s children with dis/abilities were orderlyinstitutionalized in Sweden due to lack of accessibility and aids in the surrounding society. The aim of this thesis is to discuss how ableist discourse of dis/ability and gender interacted with materiality, such as buildings, clothes and objects, in the institutions and how it affected the everyday lives of women who grew up there, a concept previously unexplored in a Swedish context. Using a qualitative method interviews were carried out with women who grew up in various institutions in Sweden from the 1930s to 1970s. The interviews were analysed using a crip theoretical understanding of dis/ability and ableism paired with Barad’s post humanist understanding of matter as both product of and producer of discourse. The analysis show that matter was created, used and understood in a constant intra-action with ableist discourse, confining, controlling and subduing the women. Matter and the use of it functioned as a tool for upholding ableism, creating a colonial structure of medical access to the children’s bodies. Hence, the use of matter can be understood as acts of ableist rhetoric created to signalize and uphold ableist standards. Such ableist rhetoric can be said to carry on into the contemporary Swedish understanding of dis/ability, making evident the on-going objectification and medicalization of people with dis/ability today and its intersection with discourses of gender and sexuality.

This thesis analyzes the concept of ”funktionalitet” (the dis/ability divide), normality and vulnerability in the Swedish Law on Support and Service to Certain Disabled People (Lagen om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade – LSS). LSS is the main rights law for people with disabilities and was groundbreaking when it came, but has since its legislation not been developed any further. Recent debate has shown that the law is not implemented according to its intentions. Through the use of discourse analysis and the theoretical perspectives ableism, intersectionality and vulnerability this thesis investigates the understanding of ”funktionalitet” in the legislation and the official government inquiry (SOU 1991:46) that submitted a proposal for the law in 1991. The main conclusions of the analysis point toward a conception of ”funktionalitet” as both depending on the power structure of ableism and as a diversity in humanity. The position as a person with disability is portrayed as a special (or pathogenic) vulnerability in order to claim special rights. Moreover the thesis briefly discusses how the position as a person with disabilities is denied other identificatory categories such as a person with a gender identity, sexuality and/or being a parent. These are topics for further research.

This thesis explores how the body and femininity are constructed by starting from the subjective experiences of 12 young women labelled with an intellectual impairment. The methodological approach is inspired by so-called participatory research. The study combines the concepts of (dis)ability and gender from a sociological perspective. It shows how the young women negotiate norms regarding the body and femininity to pursue the coveted body and femininity ideals, but also to do the opposite: resist these ideals. The thesis is based on the following four articles: Theorizing the Body: Conceptions of Disability, Gender and Normality addresses different perspectives on the body in relation to conceptions of disability, gender and normality. The article highlights the importance of integrating disability and gender when exploring an understanding of conceptions and constructions of the body. Negotiating Normality: The Complexity of Showing (off) Bodies identifies four different strategies the young women use to make themselves visible as fashionable young women of today, e.g. as non-disabled. It shows that these strategies comply with conceptions of fashion, and that they are at the same time expressions of different marks of resistance.                                                                            Risky Transitions in an Ableist Environment: The Experience of Frequent Critical Looks presents an exemplification of social construction of the body by focusing on critical looks. The concept of critical looks is analysed from an intersectional perspective, specifically in relation to how (dis)ability, gender and, to some extent, age interact. It shows how the body is made visible by being stared at, both to oneself and to others depending on place and interactions. Reflections on Collaborative Research: to What Extent, and on Whose Terms? discusses the possible methodological and ethical dilemmas found in different research phases, and in relation to the participants, in collaborative research within disability research. It shows that collaborative research can benefit from being problematized and discussed further regarding the categorization of disability as well as participation.

Using hauntology as a linchpin, this dissertation explores the undertheorized connection between intersex and disability. Building on important feminist research in the fields of intersex, queer, disability, crip, and hauntology studies, I ask, how do we understand and reconcile the contested meanings, responses to, and effects of intersex? Intersex is “a perpetually shifting phantasm” (Holmes 2002: 175), yet intersex is typically represented and treated as innate disorder, disability, or disease by medical professionals. That said, many intersex people appear to distance from disability. By engaging intersex studies with feminist disability and crip theories, however, I demonstrate that an intersex politic and intersex studies must be rooted in a disability politic and disability studies. Through a feminist disability and crip lens, I conduct a textual and critical discourse analysis of three case studies of interphobic violence or, what I term, “compulsory dyadism,” meaning the instituted cultural mandate that people cannot have intersex traits or house the “spectre of intersex” (Sparrow 2013: 29); such a spectre must be exorcised. The three case studies include nonconsensual medical interventions, sport sex testing, and employing reproductive technologies to select against intersex variations. My analyses of these case studies produce three important observations. First, intersex is presently and effectively being integrated into conventional notions of disability; second, ableist logics underpin interphobic violence; and third, compulsory dyadism is intertwined with, or is an iteration of, compulsory able-bodiedness. In recognizing this interconnection, theorizing intersex and disability together is not merely beneficial, doing so is necessary. Ultimately, my dissertation interrogates and extends questions of the ever-shifting categorization of body-minds, culturally mandated ways of being, and (the haunting effects of) pathologization. I apply pressure to the academic field of intersex studies as well as intersex activist and advocate communities to center disability in discussions concerning intersex human rights and interphobia.