http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32865 2026-06-10T20:23:17Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33401 Title: Everybody is somebody: Personhood in the context of disabled children with complex needs Authors: Hüffmann, Maren Abstract: This study explores fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of human completeness through its focus on people who challenge conventional definitions of Western personhood: children with learning disability, complex physical and sensory impairment, and additional health needs, which cause them to be dependent on others for their most basic needs. It does so through prolonged ethnographic research, which draws upon interdisciplinary sensory and phenomenological approaches, with children, their parents, and their other carers in a special school in England. By capturing the children’s lived experiences in ways that are often absent from the literature—which tends to portray disabled children with complex needs as passive recipients of care—the study offers a unique perspective on my participants’ subjectivities, examining how interactions between the children, and between children and adults, assist in constituting them as persons in their own right. I explored the children’s lives from different angles and beyond the boundaries of the school where I interacted with them directly. Like other human beings they do not live in isolation, if marginalised. Their lives are enmeshed with those of others as well as situated in society’s normative structures. Within the protective environment of school, they find a space to assert themselves in their own unique ways. In addition, their very existence acts as a disruptor of commonly known ways of thinking and being. They challenge the value of categories, not only those applied to them, but more generally the normative viewpoints that guide everyday life in the UK. Viewed both through phenomenological and Foucauldian lenses, their lives highlight dimensions of lived experiences, which appear subdued in lives of verbal, rationally thinking humans, or are not considered as valid for inclusion in reflections on personhood. These children’s ways of being draws attention to the sensory layers of human existence and its enmeshment with the wider environment. Within this context the notion of a person can be more clearly conceived to be a doing, rather than a being. Personhood, here, is perceived as an activity linked to the embodied intentional reaching out into the world. Highlighting this also emphasises the extent of their marginalisation and barriers to inclusion in UK society. Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33381 Title: New Orders: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work Authors: Thomas, P Abstract: ... Description: ... 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33358 Title: Modern Art and Radcliffe‑Brown's Scientific Aesthetics Authors: Niehaus, I Abstract: Modern art was arguably a major inspiration for the social structural approach pioneered by A.R Radcliffe-Brown. This suggestion is counter-intuitive, given that Radcliffe-Brown is known to have advocated a scientific rather than humanistic approach to the study of social life. However, during the early twentieth century, no insurmountable gulf separated the sciences and arts. Drawing on archival sources, this article shows that in addition to his anthropological work, Radcliffe-Brown was a vocal proponent of modernism in the arts, and argued that art should be in concert with the ‘scientific spirit’ of the time. He opposed photographic realism, sentimentalism, vagueness and the over-elaboration of detail; and advocated abstraction based on a definite method of composition, hard lines and definite forms. This vision is also apparent in his rejection of ethnographic romanticism and in the composition of The Social Organisation of Australian Tribes (1931). The monograph follows the principles of minimalism and abstraction and seeks to elucidate structural forms underlying social interaction. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33351 Title: Breaking the Silence: Site-Specific Performance as Radical Peacebuilding in Postcolonial Britain Authors: Dornan, I; Maples, H Abstract: ... Description: ... 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z