World Dyslexia Day presents an opportunity to reflect upon the motivations that drove the research that became my book Dyslexia: The Government of Reading (2013). Despite its historical and theoretical character, the questions I spent several years investigating were deeply personal.
At primary school, cruel bullying combined with an environment that felt rigid and inhospitable to different ways of learning left me hurting. Teachers sometimes seemed angry that I could not perform tasks in the required fashion. I remember my headteacher telling me to put my hand down during an assembly because there was no way I would know the answer. I still have a visceral memory of his invalidation of the possibility that I might have known.
I was fortunate never to doubt that I was loved by my parents. My mother was a tireless advocate for me. In 1992, a new teacher suggested that I had dyslexia and was very capable. Diagnosis gave my mother another tool to argue for adjustments. Later, following a computer crash during a GCSE examination, I began dictating my answers to a scribe. I had found a way to express my ideas with clarity. My grades improved hugely.
At Leeds, where I studied Sociology, the Social Model of Disability and Michel Foucault’s historical approach to philosophy changed my understanding of these experiences. Disability became a political question about forms of social organisation that exclude people. Foucault helped me investigate how particular human characteristics came to be valued while others were pathologised. Together, these ideas transformed a painful personal question into a research project.
Dyslexia: The Government of Reading examines how difficulties with reading became a psycho-medical concern. I traced the formation of “congenital word-blindness”, exploring the relationships between medicine, psychology, schooling and the growing importance of literacy in economic life. I was not denying biological differences. I wanted to understand how particular differences became visible, and how diagnostic categories were formed in response to them, shaping how people are treated by institutions.
One finding I continue to find powerful is the moral economy of deservingness surrounding diagnosis. Early accounts of children diagnosed with congenital word-blindness — an ancestor of the dyslexia diagnosis — often emphasised extraordinary intelligence and potential. Specialist educational interventions were therefore justified partly on the basis of their potential to enable these children to become productive adults. Such recognition can secure adjustments in education and the workplace, enabling people to flourish. But it left the wider hierarchy of human worth intact.
There is a tension here with my own history. Being told that I was capable, smart even, mattered enormously. Yet no child should have to demonstrate exceptional ability to be free from humiliation. Social science matters because it helps us understand how these hierarchies of human worth have formed, how they operate, and, in showing us that they are not natural but built by human hands, that they can also be dismantled.
Social science alone cannot dismantle these hierarchies of human worth that validate some lives and invalidate others, but it can deepen our understanding of how these systems operate, giving civil society and social movements tools to aid in this project of unbuilding. My recent book, Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence (2026), develops these concerns with systems of invalidation through a dialogue between Disability Studies and Zygmunt Bauman’s social theory. It examines how disablement changes alongside society. Older systems of classification and institutional control persist alongside newer demands for competition, flexibility and continual improvement. Greater awareness of disability does not guarantee that exclusion disappears; my argument is that disablement operates differently in our liquid times from the solid modern past. Flexible working, for instance, can enable participation in so many ways, while expectations of constant availability can create new barriers.
As I dictate this blog to my scribe, a reasonable adjustment at work, I reflect on how my achievements have been enabled by others. My new book argues that interdependence should be a starting point for understanding society. Disabled people’s dependencies are often made conspicuous, while those sustaining apparently independent lives remain obscured. Social science matters because it is amongst the most potent tools we have for helping us analyse this.