Using the concept of encounter to further the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities: what has been learned?

Abstract

Social inclusion has been an enduring policy aim of intellectual disability policy since the early 1980s, which has been difficult to achieve. It has often been conceptualised as the binary between social presence or social participation. This article synthesises the findings from a program of Australian research that explored the application of “encounter” and “conviviality” – concepts from urban geography, as lenses for understanding the types of places, activities, and practices that facilitate or obstruct social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. Three types of convivial encounter were identified: moments of shared identification, everyday recognition, and becoming known. Most common were fleeting convivial encounters of everyday recognition in public places or commercial premises. Convivial encounters were facilitated by: places where activities were non-competitive, there was a shared purpose for being there and opportunities for spoken and other forms of communication; community members’ with experience, confidence, or comfort in interacting with people with intellectual disabilities; and skilled judgments and assistance from support workers in the moment, and their decisions about use of non-segregated mainstream places. The final part of the article reviews studies by other disability studies researchers, who using ideas about encounter have found that the presence of a dog, and places where there is clarity about rules and roles, are facilitating factors, and have begun to investigate more systematic ways of creating opportunities for convivial encounters through social enterprises, community groups, classes, and volunteering.

Keywords:

• Social inclusion
• encounter
• conviviality
• support worker practice

Social inclusion remains elusive for many people with intellectual disabilities in Australia. The policy reforms of the 1980s and 1990s sought to engage people with intellectual disabilities in wider “social networks based on reciprocity, trust and mutual respect” (Gleeson, 2004, p. 315). They largely failed to achieve more than their greater presence in communities (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009). Beyond this, many people’s lives remain constrained within a “distinct social space” made up of family, co-residents with disabilities, and staff (Clement & Bigby, 2009). The new wave of policy reforms, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act (2013), and the National Disability Strategy (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011) also envisioned social inclusion of people with disabilities. More conceptual clarity about the dimensions of social inclusion, and understanding about the places, social processes, and support practices that inhibit or facilitate it, may help to ensure greater success of these reforms.

A common interpretation of social inclusion in relation to people with intellectual disabilities distinguishes between community presence and community participation; the use of facilities or services in the community available to everyone, and being part of a growing network of relationships between people with and without intellectual disabilities (O’Brien, 1987). This binary is a blunt tool for informing practice, as it pays little heed to the value or the diversity of social interactions in public, community group, or commercial domains that are not firm relationships. In 2011, we proposed that the concept of “encounter” had the potential to fill the void left between passive presence and fully-fledged relationships (Bigby & Wiesel, 2011).

The concept of encounter

The idea of encounter originated with Goffman (1961), who described it as the agreement between people to sustain a single focus of attention. Urban geographers developed it further as a way of understanding difference and diversity in cities, seeing encounters as social interactions between strangers with a common purpose in public places (Fincher & Iveson, 2008). They suggested that modern cities are characterised by social heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, often associated with community, and residents are more likely to be strangers than to know each other (Fincher & Iveson, 2008; Young, 1990). Therefore, encounters with strangers are a central feature of urban life, and integral to what it means to be socially included in the city. Encounters are “neither simply anonymous free mingling (usually seen as community presence) nor interaction based on established relationships (usually seen as community participation)” (Bigby & Wiesel, 2015, p. 308). They include fleeting or more sustained exchanges between neighbours, consumers, and shopkeepers, passengers and taxi drivers, strangers standing in a queue or sitting in a bar, beggars, and passers-by.

Fleeting encounters provide opportunities to be drawn out of “one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, the strange, the surprising” (Young, 1990, p. 239), or to “explore different sides of ourselves” (Fincher & Iveson, 2008, p.145). Beyond momentary pleasures, encounters are important to the way social differences are socially constructed and experienced. They are part of being included in a web of public respect and trust (Jacobs, 1962, p. 56), which may also expose one to different opinions and ways of life that contests “enclave consciousness” (Tajbakhsh, 2001, p. 182).

Convivial encounters are marked by friendliness or hospitality, occurring when strangers engage in shared activity with a common purpose or intent, such as tending to a community garden or participating in a community art group. In such convivial encounters, social differences between participants are not eliminated, but exist alongside momentary shared identifications experienced by encounter participants; for example, as community gardeners (Fincher & Iveson, 2008). Over time, the numerous encounters between strangers can produce a “convivial culture” in a city. Social differences, often understood as essential, fixed, and insurmountable identities, become unremarkable compared to these more transient identifications that characterise life in a convivial culture (Gilroy, 2006, p. 40).

Convivial encounters between strangers, particularly if repeated, potentially lead to a longer-term friendship. Indeed, every friendship starts as an encounter between strangers. However, a convivial encounter should be valued in its own right as an essential element of social inclusion rather than simply regarded as a stepping stone into a long-term relationship (Bigby & Wiesel, 2011).

Our program of research explored whether “encounter” and the related concept “conviviality” might provide a new lens for understanding and furthering the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. Detailed descriptions of the design and findings are available about each aspect of the study (Bigby & Wiesel, 2011, 2015; Wiesel & Bigby, 2014, 2016; Wiesel, Bigby, & Carling-Jenkins, 2013). In this article, we aimed to synthesise these findings, dispersed across disability and urban geography journals, and review the way encounter has been taken up by other researchers.

Understanding encounter as a dimension of social inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities

The study was exploratory and descriptive, funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Scheme and Industry Partners Yooralla and Jewish Care (Vic). We aimed to understand the nature of encounters between people with and without intellectual disabilities; the influence of support worker practices and broader environmental factors such as community facilities and attitudes; and the implications for social inclusion and exclusion. Ethical approval was given by the human research ethics committee of the two universities involved in the study, and informed consent was gained by each participant or where necessary the person who normally made decisions on their behalf. Four sites in Victoria, Australia, and three in metropolitan suburbs and a country town were selected as case studies to represent a diversity of communities in terms of geographic location and socio-economic profile. Each comprised a locality centred on one or more supported accommodation services for people with intellectual disabilities. The primary methods of data collection were:

• 160 hours of unstructured observations in community settings, of 26 adults with mild or moderate levels of intellectual disabilities and their support workers across 4 sites to identify types of encounter and support strategies;

• Individual and group interviews with the participants with intellectual disabilities and their support workers to seek their reflections on the observational data;

• A self-completed mail questionnaire (locality survey) with 260 responses and follow-up interviews with 22 residents across the sites residents to gain their perspective on encounter with people with intellectual disabilities

Typology of encounters

An initial typology drawing on the observational data (Wiesel et al., 2013) identified encounters between people with and without intellectual disabilities as convivial, fleeting, service, unfulfilled, or within a distinct social space. Most commonly, they were fleeting, occurring in shopping centres, streets, or on public transport. Some were pleasant and friendly while others were more hostile, involving negative looks or gestures.

The typology was refined in an iterative process to incorporate the data from interviews and locality surveys. Presented here are three types of convivial encounter (shared identification; recognition; and becoming known); and three less inclusive types of encounter (exclusionary; in a distinct social space; and non-encounters).

Convivial encounters: momentary shared identification

Very few convivial encounters, defined by Fincher and Iveson (2008) as moments of transient shared identification with strangers, were observed. Examples included being at sporting events, where two participants experienced shared identification with others as fans of their favourite teams; a couple participating in a weekly dance group in a community hall, where they shared identification as dancers with other participants and as pupils in their interactions with the teacher who corrected their steps during the class; and being part of a clean-up event a local park, where a participant shared an identity as a volunteer when he interacted in a light-hearted manner on various occasions with other volunteers about the challenges of the task.

Convivial encounters: moments of everyday recognition

Most interactions were fleeting, involving friendly interactions where people with intellectual disabilities were acknowledged by strangers without opportunity for shared, even momentary identification. We named such fleeting exchanges as moments of everyday recognition, drawing on the work of Amanda Wise (2011), who described this type of interactions between strangers as producing a “light-touch” (p. 99) but a positive sense of conviviality, where people momentarily broaden their “notion of ‘my’ community to incorporate the Other.”

Such encounters acknowledged not only the presence of people with intellectual disabilities, but their right to use a public space in a way that might be different from others. We heard, for example, through the interviews about gestures from strangers that were both symbolic, such as friendly acknowledgement, and functional, such as an offer of assistance. One interviewee talked about making a conscious effort to smile and acknowledge people with intellectual disabilities in public places to counter the stares they often attracted from others.

Many moments of everyday recognition occurred in the context of service transactions, such as making a purchase in a shop or paying a bus driver, where the distinctions between customer and provider limited opportunities for shared identification. Nevertheless, proprietors displayed patience and a willingness to slow down or depart from standard procedures to accommodate the person with an intellectual disability. The assistance or encouragement of support workers were often features of such transactions.

Convivial encounters: repeat encounters and becoming known

Through repeat convivial encounters over time, people with intellectual disabilities become known to others, transforming from strangers to acquaintances, and potentially turning from acquaintances to friends, although little evidence of this latter possibility was found in our study. Repeat encounters occurred in different types of places including local neighbourhoods, places of membership such as clubs and churches or cafés. Interviewees, for example, talked of individuals with intellectual disabilities they had come to know by name through regular interaction as neighbours, or at a church or sports club, and we observed regular users of a café and a bowling alley being welcomed by proprietors by name.

Exclusionary encounters

Some encounters were exclusionary; people with intellectual disabilities were met with impatience, fear, condescending remarks, or actions that singled them out as not fully belonging or welcome in the community. In some cases, such responses appeared to be triggered by their very presence in public, and in others in response to their behaviours in public places being perceived as unacceptable or transgressing social norms, such as being loud.

Encounters within a distinct social space

Many of the interactions we observed or heard about were in specialist places just for people with disabilities where participants were predominantly co-residents with disabilities or staff. Some of these specialist places were situated within mainstream settings. For example, we observed separate events for people with intellectual disabilities in a church and a synagogue.

Non-encounters

Perhaps most commonly observed were non-encounters; the absence of any interaction, not even a fleeting exchange of recognition, between people with intellectual disabilities and the strangers they came across when they went out. Such non-encounters are not necessarily problematic as there is no expectation in most communities that people should recognise and interact with every other person they happen to pass by. However, non-encounters become exclusionary when they are the only type of encounter people with intellectual disabilities experience in public spaces.

Barriers and enablers of convivial encounters

The way that people with intellectual disabilities use public places may be different to others. They may, for example, be accompanied by a support worker, go out in groups, require a relatively slow pace of interaction, or transgress social norms. Their presence may at times disturb others and the “sense that a common understanding concerning everyone’s social place exists and is a viable guide for daily activity” (Goffman 1971, p. 360). A deficit model of disability might emphasise their need for support or lack of social or communication skills as creating obstacles to convivial encounters. In contrast, we used a social/relational understanding of disability (Shakespeare, 2006) to analyse obstacles and enablers of convivial encounters, shifting the focus to context, the strangers people with intellectual disabilities encounter in the city, and staff of disability services employed to support their social inclusion.

Community willingness, competence, and characteristics

The locality survey indicated an uneven willingness among community members to engage with people with intellectual disabilities. For example, people who were younger (18–34 years old) or had a relative with intellectual disabilities were more likely to know a person with an intellectual disability by name, or to have had a conversation with a person with an intellectual disability in the previous month.

Some community members told us that they avoided encounters with people with intellectual disabilities, even when the opportunity arose, because they felt ill prepared or worried about the discomfort they might experience. For example, some felt they did not know the appropriate way to behave and communicate with a person who may communicate differently, without fluency or words, who looked different, or was accompanied by a support worker. Others said they were deterred by unconventional or unexpected behaviours by people with intellectual disabilities, even when it was not directly threatening to them. For example, some people had chosen to avoid contact which they perceived might lead to an over-commitment they were not willing to make, such as being asked to provide assistance or engage in an interaction for a longer period than they were comfortable with.

On the other hand, many community members participating in the survey and interviews described their proactive, conscious efforts to initiate contact with people they identified as having an intellectual disability and make them feel welcome in the community. This included commercial and community venues where staff – such as managers, shopkeepers, or librarians – made an effort to welcome and get to know a person, or group of people with intellectual disabilities visiting their venue. Engaging in encounter with someone with different cognitive abilities is not always simple but it is likely that the skill, competence, and commitment to conviviality in encounters with people with intellectual disabilities will develop among community members over time, through accumulated experience of such encounters.

There were indications that some types of community places or overall community characteristics were potentially more facilitative than others. For example, the survey showed that convivial encounters were more likely in the country town than inner or outer suburbs, in localities with a lower socio-economic profile, or with a higher overall level of social cohesion (Wiesel & Bigby, 2014). Discussions on conviviality have focused predominantly on cities, where everyday encounter with strangers is an inherent “condition of urban life” (Fincher and Iveson, 2008, p. 152). However, these findings suggest that similar forms of conviviality can also develop in smaller towns and non-urban areas, where people with intellectual disabilities experience encounter with people who are “strangers” to varying degrees. The specific type of place also appeared to make a difference. Places where we observed sustained convivial encounters were characterised by a common purpose for being there, non-competitive activity, and variety of opportunities for both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication with strangers whereas noisy places appeared to obstruct encounters.

Support worker practice

Our findings complement those from other research that have identified the poor practice of group home staff, their inadequate training or supervision, and misinterpretations or opposition to policy aims as obstructing social inclusion (Bigby, Clement, Mansell, & Beadle-Brown, 2009; Clement & Bigby, 2010; Robertson et al., 2007; Walker, 1995). Importantly, however, our findings also identified features of good practice in supporting people with intellectual disabilities to initiate and manage encounters. Examples of both facilitative and obstructive support worker practice were dramatised by a theatre group of people with intellectual disabilities and are available as part of an online training course (Bigby & Wiesel, 2015, n.d.).

Support workers play an important role in assisting people with intellectual disabilities to initiate and manage encounters, assuaging issues of community members’ competence in overcoming barriers such as moments of social awkwardness or concern about transgression of socially accepted norms. Support workers used a variety of strategies to initiate encounters, from directly introducing a service user to a stranger, to inviting a stranger to join a conversation in explicit or subtle ways. Sometimes they prompted the person they supported to initiate encounter on their own. Once an encounter had been initiated, support workers played important roles in supporting the person with an intellectual disability to manage the situation. Good practice involved judgement about when or if intervention was necessary. Sometimes it involved standing back and allowing the encounter to run its own course. At other times, good practice involved support workers providing cues or acting as an interpreter to assist a person with an intellectual disability and a stranger with whom they were interacting to better understand each other’s words, gestures, or actions. This was especially the case when a stranger’s or a person’s actions might be construed by the other as threatening or unacceptable.

A more heavy-handed – and at times problematic – intervention by support workers involved attempts to change behaviours of the person with an intellectual disability or a stranger, educating them on how to interact more respectfully. For example, by somewhat demandingly telling a bank teller to speak directly to a person with an intellectual disability rather than her support worker; or a support worker asking the person with an intellectual disability to avoid what might be construed as inappropriate behaviour, such as hugging a shop assistant she had become friendly with.

A common poor practice of support workers involved actions to prevent or terminate an encounter because it was perceived as incompatible with their planned schedule, or it might be potentially confrontational. Support workers were often observed, for example, positioning themselves between the person they were supporting and a stranger, to act as a physical barrier to block any opportunity for direct interaction. At other times, they removed the service user from a particular place to prevent the potential of encounter.

Decisions by support workers, beyond the level of micro practice, also influenced the potential for convivial encounters with strangers. We observed a tendency for support workers to take the people they supported out in groups with two workers rather than individually, which interviewees suggested deterred them from interacting. Our findings indicate that the presence of people with intellectual disabilities was more evident in more anonymous places such as shopping centres, supermarkets, and public open spaces which offer more limited prospects of becoming known than places of membership. We also observed that support workers arranged for many of the activities, which they formally documented as “community inclusion,” to take place in specialist rather than mainstream settings. For example, a Zumba class in the activity room in a cluster of independent living units, or a disco for people with intellectual disabilities, or a separate time of worship in a synagogue.

Taking up the idea of convivial encounter in the field of disability: final reflections

Various literatures point to the significance of the way place and activity combine to facilitate convivial encounters or break down prejudicial attitudes. The geographic literature suggests that places of membership or community facilities where structured opportunities exist for strangers to engage in shared purposeful activities on a regular basis such as choirs, art groups, or community gardens provide fertile grounds for convivial encounters (Fincher & Iveson 2008). Similar features, including opportunities for personal interaction, shared activities, and endorsement of authorities have been identified in contact theory (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) and research about the successful inclusion and active participation of people with intellectual disabilities in community groups (Craig & Bigby, 2015).

However, our findings echoed those of Permezel (2001), namely that opportunities for convivial encounters may be too easily bypassed, and people with intellectual disabilities relegated to segregated activities, even within mainstream places of membership. Therefore, in applying ideas about convivial encounter to people with intellectual disabilities, competent and informed support practices are often necessary to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by particular places and types of activity.

Concerns about oppressive practices – physical and psychological abuse or exploitation – against people with intellectual disabilities in public or semi-public spaces may lead support workers or people with intellectual disabilities to avoid mainstream places in favour of places that feel safer and more inclusive (Gleeson & Kearns, 2001; Hall, 2004; Milner & Kelly, 2009). Hall (2005) defined such an environment as “a place of bounded safety from the rolling turmoil of a discriminatory and often confusing world,” where inclusion by those within the space is entangled with their exclusion from outside (p. 110). Recent work also suggested the potential of such places to foster not only a sense of belonging, but broader social inclusion through creation of identities such as artist or self-advocate (Anderson & Bigby, 2017; Bigby, Anderson, & Cameron, 2018a, b). Nevertheless, while the discourse of “safe” spaces has been used at times as justification for more segregated housing and activities for people with intellectual disabilities, our findings indicated that people with intellectual disabilities experience both convivial and abusive encounters in specialist and mainstream places. Thus, safety was not determined by levels of segregation, rather by more specific attributes that can exist in mainstream, specialist, or in-between environments.

The value of using encounter to further social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities was demonstrated by this study and the work of disability researchers who are beginning to use this lens to inform the design of places and strategies to facilitate social inclusion. Bredewold, Tonkens, and Trappenburg (2016) explored the types of encounters experienced by people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities in two towns in the Netherlands, and the success of community projects created to engineer convivial encounters. They too found a predominance of “light, superficial contact” (Bredewold et al., 2016, p. 3384), rather than convivial encounters involving shared identification. Their findings also pointed to the significance of built-in boundaries, and clear rules and roles for social interactions that did not require reflexivity or negotiation in designing places to facilitate convivial encounters between people with intellectual disabilities and strangers. For example, in their study an odd-job centre, a farm, and a community garden were more successful places for convivial encounters than a community restaurant, which had less well-defined and more open-ended expectations about social interactions.

Bredewold et al.’s (2016) work in exploring key features of community places conducive to convivial encounters is similar to more recent work in Australia (Bigby, Anderson, & Cameron, 2018b). Both have moved research beyond investigating the incidental work of support workers in facilitating encounters to more planned programmatic approaches. For example, two Australian case studies detailed the individual and program-level planning, collaborative strategies, and support worker skills, such as active support, task analysis, and active mentoring, used by a new generation of day programs to create opportunities for convivial encounters through social enterprises, and partnerships with mainstream facilities, places of membership, and commercial enterprises.

Another line of enquiry has been the role that dogs play as catalysts of convivial encounters by breaking down norms about strangers speaking to each other. Bredewold et al.’s (2016) study found examples where walking a dog instigated encounters between people with and without intellectual or psychiatric disability living in the same locality. Similarly, in a pilot program where people with intellectual disabilities were matched with trained dogs and their handlers, Bould, Bigby, Bennett, and Howell (2018) found the number of convivial encounters was significantly higher when a dog was present compared to going out with the handler alone.

Clifford-Simplican and colleagues have taken up the idea of encounter in their theoretical work on defining social inclusion as a contested concept (Clifford-Simplican & Leader, 2015; Clifford-Simplican, Leader, Kosciulek, & Leahy, 2015). They suggested it is a way to modernise the concept of community participation and, similar to the urban geographers, perceive the benefits offered by moving away from a nostalgic but also communitarian notion of community inclusion as something that is rooted in place (Clifford-Simplican, 2018).

Conclusions

Encounters between strangers are an important feature of urban society, as well as non-urban communities where most people are still strangers to one another to varying degrees. Despite the often fleeting nature of encounters, participating in them is an important aspect of social inclusion in the modern city. As the literature on conviviality has suggested (Fincher & Iveson, 2008; Gilroy, 2006; Wise, 2011), over time, through numerous convivial encounters between people with and without intellectual disabilities, a convivial culture could potentially develop, where intellectual disabilities are no longer “insuperable problems of communication” (Gilroy, 2006, p. 40) across social differences, and connections with other people are forged over more transient, everyday shared identifications.

However, we are still a long way away from a convivial culture that is inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities. While light-touch moments of recognition are commonplace, more significant and potentially transformative convivial encounters between people with and without intellectual disabilities are rare. Convivial encounters demand very specific environments, and the competence and commitment of all participants in the encounter, including community members and disability support workers. The emerging body of research about facilitating convivial encounters points to the significance of (a) places where activities are non-competitive, there is a shared purpose for being there, clear norms to guide social interaction, and opportunities for spoken and other forms of communication; (b) community members with experience, confidence, or comfort in interacting with people with intellectual disabilities; and (c) support workers skilled in making judgements and providing assistance in the moment, but also in planning support to build capacity of community group members, analysing places and identifying those with features conducive to encounters and matching these to individuals’ interests, and prioritising use of non-segregated mainstream places. While we expect that attention to design, skilled support, and community commitment will develop over time through the lived experience of such encounters, existing barriers, which are often the antithesis of facilitators, need to be overcome. Initially expectations need to be raised about the scope of active support as a practice that extends beyond chores and the boundaries of group homes. Then active support, emerging knowledge about support practices that enable and places that facilitate encounter, and strategies for working with community group members, such as active mentoring need to be more fully incorporated into coherent practice frameworks and staff training.

Indeed, a convivial culture does not exist in people’s private homes, rather in the public sphere. It depends on the availability of public or semi-public spaces that are more conducive for convivial encounters, such as community gardens, public libraries, and neighbourhood houses (Fincher & Iveson, 2008). These are mainstream places that are open to the general public, or at least a broader public than just people with intellectual disabilities. But they are also inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities, an inclusivity that is achieved through proactive effort and adjustment to make them genuinely accessible and welcoming for people with intellectual disabilities. In many of these places there is a convivial atmosphere that cannot easily be described in words – let alone measured in a scientific way – which makes people feel safer to engage with others. In many cases, such places support shared projects or activities that people can work on together, which contributes to a sense of conviviality (Wiesel & Bigby, 2016). Disability support workers designing and implementing community inclusion programs and activities need to know these places. Just as importantly, disability rights advocacy work could also play a more active role in promoting this type of generic, mainstream community services, as part of wider coalitions involving other sectors and citizens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage grant LP13100189 with support of Industry Partners, Yooralla and Jewish Care.