A Transformatory Ethic Of Inclusion

Inclusion, is a topical notion which underpins contemporary human service practices and policies within Western Judeo-Christian societies. Inclusion is most often considered within socio-historical and socio-political contexts, whereby technical and legislative responses are sought. However, this book explores the question, "How ethically defensible is the notion of inclusion in relation to people with intellectual disability?"

This book explores why, after forty years of funded policies of social inclusion, persons living with an intellectual disability are still separated from the social fabric of neoliberal societies. David Treanor shows how the nature of the reform process is driven unnecessarily by the economic neoliberal paradigm, the cultural misconceptions of intellectual disability, and the inattention accorded to personal relationships between persons living with and without an intellectual disability. Treanor utilizes John Macmurray’s personalist philosophy, Julia Kristeva’s ontology of disability and Michele Foucault’s concept of bio-power to explain this phenomenon. The concepts in this book challenge current approaches to social inclusion and have radical implications for future practices.

The social position of learning disabled people has shifted rapidly over the last 20 years, from long-stay institutions, first into community homes and day centres, and now to a currently emerging goal of "ordinary lives" for individuals using person-centred support and personal budgets. These approaches promise to replace a century and a half of "scientific" pathological models based on expert assessment, and of the accompanying segregated social administration which determined how and where people led their lives, and who they were. This innovative volume explains how concepts of learning disability, intellectual disability and autism first came about, describes their more recent evolution in the formal disciplines of psychology, and shows the direct relevance of this historical knowledge to present and future policy, practice and research. Goodey argues that learning disability is not a historically stable category and different people are considered "learning disabled" as it changes over time. Using psychological and anthropological theory, he identifies the deeper lying pathology as "inclusion phobia", in which the tendency of human societies to establish an in-group and to assign out-groups reaches an extreme point. Thus the disability we call "intellectual" is a concept essential only to an era in which to be human is essentially to be deemed intelligent, autonomous and capable of rational choice. Interweaving the author's historical scholarship with his practice-based experience in the field, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia challenges myths about the past as well as about present-day concepts, exposing both the historical continuities and the radical discontinuities in thinking about learning disability.

What are the ethical and political implications when the very foundations of life—things of awe and spiritual significance—are translated into products accessible to few people? This book critically analyses this historic recontextualisation. Through mediation—when meaning moves ‘from one text to another, from one discourse to another’—biotechnology is transformed into analysable data and into public discourses.

This volume is a forward–looking intersection of Sociological perspectives on mathematics classrooms and socio-political perspectives on mathematics education. The first perspective has generated a substantial body of knowledge in the mathematics education. Interactionist research has deepened our understanding of interaction processes, socio-mathematical norms and the negotiation of meaning, generating a ‘micro-sociology’ or a ‘micro-ethnography’ of the mathematics classroom. More recently, socio-political perspectives on mathematics education interrelate educational practices in mathematics with macro-social issues of social equity, class, and race and with the policies that regulate institutionalized mathematics education. This book documents, strings together and juxtaposes research that uses ethnographical classroom data to explain, on the one hand, how socio-political issues play out in the mathematics class. On the other hand, it illuminates how class, race etc. affect the micro-sociology of the mathematics classroom. The volume advances the knowledge in the field by providing an empirical grounding of socio-political research on mathematics education, and it extends the frame in which mathematical classroom cultures are conceived.

This edited collection draws on a range of disciplines in exploring the central place of narrative in social inquiry and understanding the ethical life. It provides scholarly and practical insights into the rewards and potential pitfalls of working in, and with narrative. It offers readers a broad range of carefully considered examples; the use of art in enhancing insight into the plights of rural communities in Australia; the use of illness narratives in medical education; applying narratives of torture survivors and torturers in shaping humane political response and policy in the face of terrorism, and the place of the music, as a vehicle of story telling and moral growth. This volume illuminates the explicit links between the importance of narrative, that is, the telling of stories to create shape and meaning in our lives, and ethical engagement so critical to the achievement of a good life.

Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics. What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine? In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.

'There's so many different types of abuse, and it all comes down to the same thing. It's making people nothing. And Fran was nothing. There was never anything nice said about her, everything was negative. And she had to put up with that, and we had to put up with that, until we all sort of believed it, almost.' Preventing the Emotional Abuse and Neglect of People with Intellectual Disability throws light onto the traumatic experiences faced by people with intellectual disability living in disability accommodation services. Through the narratives of nine people with intellectual disability and their family members, it reveals: the problem of systematic abuse; the cumulative impact of emotional and psychological abuse and neglect over time; recognition of the abuse by people with intellectual disability; and the lack of moral authority afforded to them in abuse acknowledgement and reporting. The author suggests a number of positive approaches and methods to help all those working with people with intellectual disability to prevent emotional abuse, respond appropriately and effectively support the recovery of victims. This book will prove to be indispensable for social care workers, care home managers, social workers, researchers and academics in the disability field, social sciences students, human rights workers and abuse practitioners.