Just Mothers: Criminal justice, care ethics and "disabled" offenders

Join the Centre for Criminology and Professor Chrissie Rogers for an insightful open seminar.

Professor Chrissie Rogers, University of Bradford joined Bradford as a Professor of Sociology in September 2017. Chrissie graduated from Essex a PhD (ESRC) in Sociology in 2004, after which she took up an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge. The PhD research was with mothers and fathers who have children identified with ‘special educational needs’.

Professor Rogers subsequently published this as a monograph with Palgrave in 2007 as Parenting and Inclusive Education.

Most recently Professor Rogers has completed a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship called Care-less Spaces: Prisoners with learning difficulties and their families.

Research with prisoners’ families is limited in the context of learning difficulties/disabilities (LD) and autism spectrum. Life-story interviews with mothers reveal an extended period of emotional and practical care labour, as the continuous engagement with their son’s education and experiences of physical and emotional abuse are explored. Prior to their son’s incarceration, mothers spoke of barriers to support throughout their childrearing, as well as limited or absent preventative/positive care practices. Subsequently prison seemed to feature as a progression. Mothers have experienced abuse; physical and/or emotional, as well as lives that convey accounts of failure. Not their failure, but that of the systems. A care ethics model of disability assists an analysis of the narratives where care-less spaces are identified. Interrelated experiences merging emotional responses to extended mothering, the external forces of disabilism and destructive systems, lead to proposing a rehumanising of care practices within education and the criminal justice system.

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Criminology. To find out more about the Centre for Criminology, visit our website and follow us on Twitter.