Overview
- One of the few ethnographies of disability, especially severe intellectual disability
- Suggests a methodology for future research, through reflection and consideration of the ethics involved with consent, communication, and cooperation in communities with disability
- Examines how adolescents with intellectual disabilities are confined and treated as “contaminated” by those who impose a highly structured, ritualized environment
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Keywords
- special needs education
- intellectual disability
- embodiment
- containment
- contamination
- surveillance
- neuroscience
- health
- disability studies
About this book
In this ethnographic investigation of a special education needs college in Australia, Jocelyn D. Avery explores how the self-identity of people with severe intellectual identities is influenced by carers and support people in their lives. Employing theoretical foundations of self-identity and embodiment and drawing largely on Mary Douglas’s (1996) notions of ritual and hygiene, purity and danger, Avery argues that students in this environment are treated as though they exist in a vacuum, rather than a highly complex social environment: strategies to ‘contain’ their difficult selves ultimately lead to continued confinement, as if the students themselves were ‘contaminated’. In the midst of this much-needed ethnography, Avery meditates on her own role: matters of consent, communication, and cooperation pose a challenge to anthropological engagement with severe intellectual disability, but researcher ethics and positionality have their own difficulties. The reflection provided here will provide a guide for future researchers to sensitively engage with people with disability.
Reviews
“Conducting ethnographic research across significant cognitive and communicative difference poses formidable challenges— methodological, ethical and interpretive. Jocelyn Avery takes up these challenges with aplomb. Through close attention to shared embodied experience, she suggests convincingly that the countless little injustices to which students with severe intellectual difficulties are subjected are deeply significant, affecting their well-being and that of their society.” (Elizabeth Fein, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University, USA)
“A must-read for students and scholars in anthropology and disability studies. Avery combines personal experience of caregiving with her knowledge of embodiment to bring clarity to the ways embodied others are affected by their disabling environment and those they share it with. As a carer myself, this book was enlightening.” (Aaron J. Jackson, PhD, University of Melbourne, Australia)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jocelyn D. Avery, PhD, is an independent anthropological researcher, focusing on intellectual disability.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: An Ethnography of Severe Intellectual Disability
Book Subtitle: Becoming 'Dirty Little Freaks'
Authors: Jocelyn D. Avery
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-32208-3Published: 27 November 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 219
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations