Search Results

The public and the relational: the collaborative practices of the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History

Helen Graham, Victoria Green, Kassie Headon, Nigel Ingham, Sue Ledger, Andy Minnion, Row Richards, and Liz Tilley

in Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices

This chapter discusses the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History. It points to a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics — public ... More

This chapter discusses the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History. It points to a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics — public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity — and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. Rather than favouring one or the other, the chapter argues that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue needed to be developed. Both political traditions have a history of being very effectively expressed in the learning disability self-advocacy movement as speaking up and being heard, and of arguing for services to start with the individual by being more ‘person-centered’. As such, the chapter reveals that the task of this archive is to explore fruitful combinations and collaborations between the two political traditions.Less

Introduction: The Emergent Critical History of Intellectual Disability

Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton

in Intellectual disability: A conceptual history, 1200-1900

Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the ... More

Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the challenges of investigating the forces shaping the concept of intellectual disability in Europe and Britain across the centuries: not only those generated by shifting language and terminology, but also the demands imposed by the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which takes us through histories of literature, religion, law, education, philosophy, psychology and medicine, in addition to engaging with cultural and social history. Further, the fundamental slipperiness of the idea of intellectual disability raises the question of whether it could even be said to exist in forms similar to that which it assumes today. This introduction also includes a review of literature exploring the history of intellectual disability, and an overview of the chapters to follow.Less

Introduction

Jenifer L. Barclay

in The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

This chapter introduces the ways that The Mark of Slavery moves between experiences of disability in everyday enslaved life and the discursive relationship between racism and ableism forged in ... More

This chapter introduces the ways that The Mark of Slavery moves between experiences of disability in everyday enslaved life and the discursive relationship between racism and ableism forged in antebellum medicine, law, politics, and popular culture. The “new” disability history and, in particular, this field’s use of a social (as opposed to a medical) model of disability is central to the project of writing a disability history of slavery. Disability’s power to stigmatize derived from its relationship to abnormality and its ability to rationalize inequality hinged on one’s real or imagined proximity to it. As disability intertwined with the broader metalanguage of race in the antebellum years, it minimized or amplified specific qualities imagined as innate to whiteness or blackness, racializing and delimiting “normal” bodies.Less

Introduction: Queercrip Historical Analysis and the Rural White Anti-idyll

Ryan Lee Cartwright

in Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

This chapter proposes queercrip history as a methodology for researching queer history, disability history, and transgender history in white rural America. Queer crip analysis draws from crip theory ... More

This chapter proposes queercrip history as a methodology for researching queer history, disability history, and transgender history in white rural America. Queer crip analysis draws from crip theory and crip of color theory, critical disability studies, disability justice, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. The chapter uses queercrip analysis to read against the grain of the anti-idyll. It considers material circumstances, mundane sociality, and complex personhood to understand how support and intimacy co-exist with racialized, sexualized, ableist violence. To do so, the chapter first unpacks the myth of white rustic virtue, examining how whiteness is constructed through settler colonialism, anti-blackness, a possessive investment in whiteness, and racialized hierarchies of migrant labor; how ideas of rustic virtue are constructed through heteronormativity and ablenormativity; and how the social and material privileges of whiteness function as a consolation prize for the nonnormative. Next, the chapter proposes queercrip history as a method for reading historical documents imaginatively, infusing them with crip knowledge and queer questions. Crip knowledge includes a focus on interdependence, mutual aid, crip skills, crip values, and assistive devices. Finally, the chapter defines the anti-idyll as an optic and examines what happens when local gossip travels and becomes nationalized.Less

Introduction

Sanders Marble

in Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960

The introduction establishes a framework for the book. For armies, physical standards are practical requirements for military service that are absent for civilians. But disability is a construct ... More

The introduction establishes a framework for the book. For armies, physical standards are practical requirements for military service that are absent for civilians. But disability is a construct rather than an absolute, and standards are lowered when more manpower is needed. Standards (and substandard) can be set in terms of physical capability, age limits, political reliability, sex, or racial/national minorities. Disability history has looked at veterans but not soldiers still in service; military history has a bias towards elite units rather than mediocre or poor units.Less

Introduction

Jan Walmsley and Simon Jarrett (eds)

in Intellectual Disability in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives on People, Policy, and Practice

The introduction explains the selection and range of countries that are covered by the book and offers a brief historiography of the field. It also discusses the use of life stories in intellectual ... More

The introduction explains the selection and range of countries that are covered by the book and offers a brief historiography of the field. It also discusses the use of life stories in intellectual disability history and analyses the differing roles that eugenics had placed in this history. An overview of chapters is then followed by a discussion of the complexities of language in intellectual disability history generally and in a transnational approach in particular. This section then brings some of the main themes of the book, in particular the role of families, problems of exclusion and inequality, the formation of out-groups and the question of progress. Finally the section discusses future possible transnational approaches in this field of study.Less

Peter the ‘Wild Boy’: What Peter Means to Us

Katie Branch, Clemma Fleat, Nicola Grove, Tim Lumley Smith, and Robin Meader

in Intellectual disability: A conceptual history, 1200-1900

Peter the Wild Boy was famous in his day as a feral child who provided inspiration and example for philosophical debates about nature and nurture, and the essential qualities of humanity. ... More

Peter the Wild Boy was famous in his day as a feral child who provided inspiration and example for philosophical debates about nature and nurture, and the essential qualities of humanity. Openstorytellers, a performance company whose members have intellectual and learning disabilities, has developed a performance and workshop based on his story. In this chapter the members of Openstorytellers reflect on the implications of the ways Peter is represented in literature and popular culture, and draw important connections between his life and their own. Less

Conclusions

Sanders Marble

in Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960

This chapter examines similarities and differences of the case studies in this book. Grouping sub-standard men into separate units and giving them secondary tasks has worked, and is easier to manage ... More

This chapter examines similarities and differences of the case studies in this book. Grouping sub-standard men into separate units and giving them secondary tasks has worked, and is easier to manage than spreading them thinly around an army. Suggestions for future research are mentioned.Less

Visiting Earlswood: The Asylum Travelogue and the Shaping of ‘Idiocy’

Patrick McDonagh

in Intellectual disability: A conceptual history, 1200-1900

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were ... More

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after. Less

Normate Template: Knowing-Making the Architectural Inhabitant

Aimi Hamraie

in Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability

Chapter 1 uses images in architectural handbooks to study the history of architectural design for an average body.

Stuck in the Poorhouse: William Fales and the Experience of Institutionalization

Gabriel J. Loiacono

in How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories

When Americans think of welfare before the twentieth century, we usually think of the poorhouse. Poorhouses were expensive investments, though, rising and falling in popularity throughout the ... More

When Americans think of welfare before the twentieth century, we usually think of the poorhouse. Poorhouses were expensive investments, though, rising and falling in popularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter focuses on the generation of Americans most affected by poorhouses through the life of William Fales, an articulate, devout Christian who suffered from severe rheumatism. Voters’ great hopes for poorhouses were that they would save towns’ money in the long run, and provide more humane care. Fales’s experience shows what these poorhouses were actually like. While Fales does not stand in for every poorhouse inmate, his life shows how isolating and dangerous poorhouses could be, and what opportunities for fellowship inside a poorhouse could be. His life also shows how private philanthropy could complement poor relief.Less