Thinking about intellectual disability care : an intersubjective approach

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT : Of the many challenges facing persons with intellectual impairment in South Africa, disablingcare continues to confront individuals who live and work with intellectual disability.Intellectual impairment care can be conceptualised as more than the performance of tasksinvolving giving and receiving, but can be understood as intersubjective and relationalperson-making exchanges that also unfold in broader socio-political spaces. Important voiceshave been marginalised in discourses on intellectual disability, and, in South Africa,traditional hegemonies of knowledge dominate thinking spaces that are yet to be taken up bythe opinions of intellectually impaired individuals and care workers. Since experiences ofcare have been rarely voiced or validated by intellectually impaired individuals themselves,making and taking care should also refer to our capacity for reflection regarding ourparticipation in many of its practices.This study opens up possibilities for fresh perspectives on psychiatric intellectual disabilitycare by bringing together apparently disparate fields of relational psychoanalysis andintersubjectivity on the one hand, and contemporary models of disability on the other. Theresearch collaboratively tracks the voices of its primary speakers, and touches on problematicaspects of care by foregrounding subjective experiences of living and working withpsychiatric intellectual impairment, and by exploring the making of disabled and disablingcare. It then becomes possible to see how dynamics of psychiatric intellectual disability carecan both complicate and be addressed by a relational and intersubjective conceptualisation ofethical care. It was the task of the researcher, as scribe of this study, to facilitate conditions inwhich expert voices on intellectual disability care could be raised. In such intersubjectivespaces the experience of impairment is no longer simply given or bestowed, but voiced by thereal experts – those who live and work with intellectual impairment in a disabling world.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University