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doi: 10.1111/bld.12473pmid: N/A
This article examines the 50 year history of the British Journal of Learning Disabilities, which was launched as Apex, the Journal of the Institute of Mental Subnormality, in 1973. Changes in language and terminology are tracked and the journal is placed in the context of wider policy and social developments. Three general phases are identified in the trajectory of the journal: the hospital period, the shift to community care, and the post‐institutional period. The journal was not entirely anti‐institution in its earliest days, and each transition through its different phases is gradual rather than abrupt. The enduring continuity of the journal's commitment to interdisciplinarity, eclecticism and practice‐based research is evident throughout, and some of the controversies that have arisen from this approach are examined. The conflict between the desire to include people with learning disabilities in the journal and the academic demands of journal production is described.
Jarrett, Simon; Tilley, Elizabeth
doi: 10.1111/bld.12461pmid: N/A
This article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis which emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and represented ‘idiots’ as creatures of the asylum and objects of the medicalised gaze. In the 1990s a new social history challenged these assumptions, focusing on the iniquities of institutionalisation and the eugenics period, while attempting to give a voice to people with learning disabilities and their families in their own history. A cultural history movement later emerged to challenge the idea of learning disability as a fixed universal concept over time. It argued that the idea of learning disability (in all its different linguistic iterations) is contingent on time and place, and a product of the culture within which it is framed. Not all work fits neatly into one of these categories, sometimes they overlap and sometimes they cannot be easily categorised. Nevertheless, these broad frames of reference within the historiography of learning disability do point to wider social, cultural and political concerns, which are worth holding in mind as we consider how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy‐making and change. The authors describe the encouraging recent emergence of historian activists who seek to write and define their own history, and who may constitute a fourth wave in the historiography of learning disability.
doi: 10.1111/bld.12445pmid: N/A
It is perhaps inevitable that the academic study of learning disabilities is often undertaken by established scholars with little lived experience of the condition. So, what has it been like for someone from outside the academy, with a long career in the arts, who is also the father of a severely learning‐disabled young man, to write a book‐length history of learning disabilities in culture and society? How is it possible to reconcile such a biological reality with the many caveats about the social construction of the condition? How can we retain a belief in scientific analysis when the categorisation of learning‐disabled people seems to have caused as many problems as it solves? Furthermore, how can such an account be attempted when so much of the written record is by people who are placed in positions of power over learning‐disabled people and when the true voice of experience is so often silenced, or, like the author's son, silent? The attempt to answer these questions reveals a field rich with contradiction. Despite some advances, much of the social and cultural history of learning disabilities tells a tale of neglect, abandonment and abuse, with confused cultural attitudes too often shaping practice. When the telescope is reversed, however, severe learning disabilities provide us with a kind of Brechtian “alienation effect” which reveals the fault lines running through so many progressive movements and helps us to frame them historically, while also challenging assumptions about how those with severe learning disabilities are regarded and can best be given the support and freedom that they need.
doi: 10.1111/bld.12467pmid: N/A
Owing to the different models of disablement in different religions and cultures around the world, social and aesthetic representations of intellectually disabled people are diverse in various societies. Disability is perceived in a different way in India than in the West. There are very few studies on the complex role of Indian mainstream Hindi cinema in the representation of intellectual and developmental disabilities in India. This paper explores the potential of shifting representations of intellectual and developmental disability in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century Bollywood films in the context of multiple aesthetic challenges they pose. The shift in screen image of intellectual impairment is strongly related to the shifting and ambiguous sociocultural model of personhood in India. In earlier Indian Hindi films, characters with intellectual disabilities were depicted in terms of good/bad moralistic labels, compromised body image, leading to aesthetic undesirability. In later Hindi films, they were instead represented as enduring human beings. In short, in earlier Hindi films, there was a discriminatory hegemonic bias in the depiction of intellectually disabled characters, in contrast to that in later Hindi films, where they were depicted in richly diverse perspectives. The changing artistic parlance becomes even more interesting in the context of major developments in Indian governmental policies and rights for the disabled in the last two decades. Thus, the paper highlights that contemporary Hindi films urge the audience to consider intellectual and developmental disability as a multilayered issue and rather than merely as a disease.
doi: 10.1111/bld.12444pmid: N/A
The Camphill Movement is one of the largest independent providers of social care for people with a learning disability: there are 119 communities located throughout the world. From the start, the principal aim of the Movement—co‐founded by Dr. Karl König and his wife Tilla (née Maasberg) in Aberdeen—was to build communities in which children and adults with a learning disability could live, learn, and work with others in healthy social relationships. Karl König was born in Leopoldstadt, Vienna on the 25 September 1902 and died on the 27 March 1966 in a Camphill community in Brachenreuthe, Germany. Mathilde Maasberg was born in Gnadenfrei, Silesia, on the 9 March 1902 and died on the 17 September 1983 in the Camphill community of Fairways in South Africa. The paper focuses primarily on the lives of Karl and Tilla König and highlights the key points in their respective biographies. Whilst it is usually the name of Dr. Karl König that is associated with the Camphill Movement, a case is presented here that his wife significantly shaped the essential character of the Camphill way of life. She had been born into a Moravian Brethren settlement and latterly wove a strong, discernible and enduring element of Moravian practice into the fabric of Camphill life and work. Since the deaths of Karl and Tilla König Camphill communities have continued to seek the creation of environments where the economic, social and spiritual aspects of the community life complement one another. The paper identifies six key constituents that it is argued are central to the essence of Camphillness: mutuality, rhythmicity, spirituality, tranquillity, ecological sensitivity and economic sustainability. The paper ends with reflections on the 21st Century relevance of Camphill communities.
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