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

Summary, in English

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.

• Author: Niklas Altermark
• Department/s: Department of Political Science
• Publishing year: 2017-10-21
• Language: English
• Pages: 1315-1332
• Publication/Series: Disability and Society
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 9
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1322497
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Routledge
• Topic: Public Administration Studies
• Keywords: deinstitutionalisation; disability studies; Intellectual disability; postcolonial theory; Spivak
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0968-7599