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Glancing back on intellectual disability research

NEW FROM OUR RESEARCHERS: Niklas Altermark’s article 'The Post-Institutional Era: Visions of History in Research on Intellectual Disability' is included in the 30 year anniversary issue of the leading disability studies journal Disability & Society.

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

Niklas Altermark's personal page here on the department's website.

Read the article on tandfonline.com