Creating Time for LGBT+ Disabled Youth: Research Involvement in Pandemic Times

Description

This presentation explores normative constructions of time and its relationship to co-production. We use the concept of chrononormativity to engage with temporal orders in research, and how these ground expectations around pacing, ordering, trajectories and the ‘right’ time for things to happen. Developed by disability, queer, and trans scholars, chrononormativity references the construction of time as linear and logical. This has been attributed to the enclosure of people’s mundane realities in standardized ‘clock time’ and to heteronormative ideas of reproduction that organise the future. Our engagement with co-production stems from our observations on a research project investigating personal support, sexuality, and gender in young disabled adults’ lives. At the outset of this, we recruited a diverse Participatory Advisory Group (PAG) of young disabled adults who are LGBT+ to co-construct and design the project. While this research has a temporal ordering – established through research contracts and workloads and represented in research instruments and plans, such as Gantt charts, which reflects the way that time is a ‘resource’ that needs to be carefully managed in research – co-production can work against the grain of ‘research time’ by demanding that work gets slowed down or managed flexibly. This was something we observed as undertook co-production work during the Covid19 pandemic, which required us to think differently about space and time for this co-production to be accessible to these young adults and to include their diverse identities and bodies. Drawing on our experiences, we explore tensions with normative temporal expectations as we have worked with a group of young LGBT+ disabled adults.

Period	21 May 2021
Event title	Living Gender in Diverse Times: Young People’s Understandings and Practices of Gender in the Contemporary UK
Event type	Conference
Location	Sheffield, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National