The infantilization of intellectual disability and political inclusion: a pedagogical approach
The infantilization of intellectual disability and political inclusion: a pedagogical approach

Summary/Abstract: The present paper looks at the way in which political and scientific frameworks, as well as everyday life dynamics work to exclude people living with intellectual disability (ID) in Romania from political life and how these dynamics could be overcome through crafting communicative-dialogic pedagogical interventions geared at political inclusion. I argue that the political exclusion of people with ID is built into the formal political order, as well as doubled by a twofold infantilizing dynamic. On the one hand, the scientific and academic psycho-pedagogical discourse still operates with classifications that inscribe people with ID with chronological “normal” ages inferior to their biological age. Their subject position is thus “fixed” at an age below the voting limited. This move is seconded by the way in which (formerly) institutionalized people with ID are referred to as “children” (despite their fully adult ages) in a small (post)institutional town, as well as in other care settings that I have explored ethnographically. Finally, the paper explores the stepping stones of alternative interventions, built on a communicative-dialogic methodology for politically including people with ID that could work to overcome the infantilizing dynamics.

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