Citizenship: locating people with learning disability

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Citizenship locating people with learning
disability

• Dr Tony Gilbert.
• School of Social Work and Primary Care
• Faculty of Health and Social Work.
• University of Plymouth U.K.

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This presentation has four sections

• The question of citizenship
• Methodology
• Themes from the analysis
• Locating people with learning disability

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The question of citizenship

• Relationship between the state and individuals
  questions of inclusion, exclusion, social status
  and entitlements.
• Dynamic concept producing an instrumental
  equality compromised by the persistence of
  inequalities.
• A moral discourse of rights and duties that
  produces a second class position for those unable
  to work.

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Citizenship and Governmentality Barns et al.
1999

• Discourses of citizenship are politically
  ambiguous, contested and contradictory.
• Task is to explore the way discourses of
  citizenship are deployed in the management of
  populations.
• Affiliation to particular communities.
• Behaviour regulated through being located in a
  network of obligations.
• The assignment of different destinies.

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Methodology

• Aim. To explore conceptions of citizenship among
  professionals in learning disability services.
• Design. Discourse analysis consisting of two
  elements academic literature and interviews with
  professionals n18.
• Data collection. Macro literature review. Micro
  text from interviews.
• Analysis. Discourse analysis analytical themes
  drawn from the literature.

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Citizen-tenant.

• Two different models of support
• Traditional residential care model based on the
  organisation receiving money to provide for the
  individuals needs.
• Supported living model based on individuals
  claiming housing and unemployment benefits.
  Individuals receive a legal tenancy providing a
  private space the citizen-tenant.

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Citizenship themes 1.

• Citizenship and work Ambiguous relationship with
  labour market. At once worker, volunteer, object
  of charity. Supported living provided an
  instrumental equality through benefits.
• Citizenship and participation Active advocacy
  and passive consumerist forms of participation.
  Consumerism promoted as choice, advocacy largely
  colonised by managerial imperatives.

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Citizenship themes 2.

• Citizenship and Community Actively promoted
  voluntary activity in the community promoting a
  felt responsibility, also a focus on behaving
  responsibly.
• Citizenship and Consumption Property rights and
  consumption outside of direct wages. Paradox
  participation and integration low but consumption
  high.

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Citizenship Locating people with learning
disability

• Deployment of discourses of citizenship enables
  people with learning disability to be managed
  away from large institutions.
• People with learning disability are managed in
  specialized spaces in the community which remain
  supervised by professionals.
• Professionals enable people to move along a
  continuum towards self-management while they
  manage the risks involved.

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Locating people with learning disability 1.

• Discourses provide a number of reference points
  work choice obligations but penetrate in
  partial and fragmented ways producing different,
  often contradictory, positions.
• Ethic of the self works to construct people with
  learning disability as useful

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Ethic of the Self.

• Ethical substance Positive identities and
  feelings of responsibility and obligation
  citizen-tenant, worker, consumer, member of the
  community.
• Mode of subjection Recognition of the rules and
  norms of these roles and putting them into
  practice.
• Self forming activity practices people engage in
  to develop self practices of self discipline
  maintaining personal space, relationships with
  others.
• Telos The end product, useful, productive and
  self managing individual.

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Gilbert T, Cochrane A Greenwell S. Citizenship
locating people with learning disabilities,
International Journal of Social Welfare.
accepted for publication May 2004. Publication
date October 2005..