Moving through the system: The ruling relations of migration, mobility, and childhood disability

Abstract

This thesis is about institutional interactions of young disabled children and families who have migrated or have travelled to access services. Through an institutional ethnography, I seek to understand these families’ everyday activities and to make the invisible work of these families visible, and ultimately to interrogate the systems connected to childhood disability and different forms of human movement. For this dissertation, I examined longitudinal data from the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System Project (IECSS; 2021). The IECSS project is an institutional ethnography, a methodology originally developed by the Canadian sociologist and feminist studies scholar, Dorothy Smith (2006). The central problematic of interest for this dissertation was the intersection of childhood disability and human movement in the form of transnational migration, internal migration, and travelling to access services. Through this institutional ethnography, I entered into the everyday experiences of disabled children and their families through the standpoint of the IECSS family informants from across Canada. An analysis of the institutional maps, interview transcripts, and attribute tables led to six (6) key findings: (1) Migration and travelling: What is the context of human movement and childhood disability?; (2) People move, texts stay still; (3) Duplication and replication of services across different communities; (4) Formal and informal support networks: making it work when you’re mobile; (5) The importance of gaining perceived and official citizenship status and; (6) Restarting the process: The added work on families and disabled children. The findings of this study are significant for research, policy, and practice in the area of early childhood, disability, and human movement.