The post-institutional era: visions of history in research on intellectual disability

Abstract

In this article, I address how the history of intellectual disability politics is made sense of in social scientific research and popular discourse. In particular, I discuss the construction of a narrative break between a past of institutionalisation and the present policies of citizenship. By drawing on how postcolonial theorists criticise common ideas about decolonisation, I argue that this narrative impedes our appreciation of how power has transformed, rather than disappeared, after deinstitutionalisation. Instead, I propose ‘post-institutionalisation’ as a name for the present era of intellectual disability politics, suggesting that we need to attend to continuities and discontinuities of how the group is governed; how paternalism lives on after deinstitutionalisation and how the goals of citizenship inclusion give rise to new technologies of government. I conclude the article by discussing the necessity and the dangers of involving people with intellectual disabilities in the analysis of post-institutional government.

Keywords:

• Intellectual disability
• deinstitutionalisation
• Spivak
• postcolonial theory
• disability studies

Notes

1. Throughout the text, I make a distinction between ‘social scientific research on (intellectual) disability’ and ‘(critical) disability studies’, where the latter denotes research approaches that, drawing on various critical theories, often have argued against the oppression of people with disabilities and that have developed in relation to the disability movement.

2. Furthermore, institutionalisation is still the primary way of directing policies towards people with intellectual disabilities in many parts of the world. What I discuss here is a specific way of seeing historical evolvement, which occurs across geographic borders, not the realities of deinstitutionalisation, which cannot be described in such general terms.

3. I am not entirely convinced by Clifford Simplican’s empirical description here. Rather, I believe that much self-advocacy more or less explicitly has questioned the normativity of citizenship. However, I do think she pinpoints a significant effect of common presumptions regarding the emancipatory potential of citizenship, although these are not primarily put forward by disability organisations.