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Abstract
Modernising discourses of intellectual disability have brought innovative social technologies that promote participation and freedom for people so labelled. This thesis argues there is a key experiential contradiction between these discourses as operationalised in neo-liberalism and the ways that people with intellectual disability embrace self-advocacy and become political actors in their own right. Through its inherently moral claims, self-advocacy supports the experiential voice of the 'other' and reveals itself as a sustaining and enduring pillar in the struggle against human injustice and inequity. These other discourses, in contrast, intensify individualisation, ignore power relations and depoliticise self-advocacy as a politics of resistance.
The first part of the thesis critically examines the emergence of intellectual disability as a dimension of human difference and examines how forms of knowledge shape social and policy responses to such people. The second part presents a collaborative action research methodology and a reflective study which challenges the bio-medical, positivist and psycho-reductionist styles of research that have objectified people with intellectual disability. Using this methodology, the voices and experiences of two groups of self-advocates, one in England and the other in Australia are interpreted.
Contemporary professional and other governmental interventions demand individual competencies in the pursuit of self-determination. These discourses of empowerment and citizenship are in constant tension with historically conditioned structures which shape the material and social lives of people with intellectual disability. The thesis finds similarities in the ways that self-advocates and their allies interpret these political realities and work within, across and beyond their contradictory trajectories of constraint and freedom.
The study suggests that self-advocacy is a complex and sophisticated practice aimed at recognition of the unique lived experience of intellectual disability and the legitimacy of claims to self-representation. It also operates at a deeper level as an emotional process of transformation. Its powerful recuperative character sustains liberated identities for people with intellectual disability, many of whom have experienced lives of abuse, neglect and mis-recognition. Such practices have the potential to contribute to transforming both the centres of policy-making and power and subaltern selves.