Harry Caton

I am a third-year PhD student based in the English department at Exeter. My work is situated within the medical humanities more generally; my interests include cultural studies, critical theory, historicisms, and representations of disability. 

My PhD project - Poster Perfect: Chrononormativity, Charity Culture, and the Crip Child - concerns the history, ideology, and economic implications of the popular figure of the disabled poster child, as portrayed in disability charity advertising. My project starts with this child's origins in the Victorian period; spans its development across the changing discourses of eugenics, advertising, and adolescence in modernity; and moves through to its still-popular usage in the present day.

 
I am particularly concerned with the theoretical aspects of this figure, hoping to build a critical framework based around the interaction between the perceived physical inadequacies of childhood and disability. I am interested in making a contribution to a topic that has been an as-yet understudied. Drawing upon and combining critical sources ranging from Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton's theories of the child to Robert McRuer and Lennard J. Davis' ideas of ablenormativity, I intend to explore the construction and popular representation of the growing disabled child.

In 2021, I was awarded the College of Humanities Home Studentship for my current PhD project. Currently based between London and Exeter, I am supervised by Professor Laura Salisbury and Professor Jana Funke.