Disability and Generation: or the end of life as we know it?

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Disability and Generationor the end of life as
we know it?

• Dr Mark Priestley
• Centre for Disability Studies
• University of Leeds
• www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies

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Life course approaches

• Individual-biographical
• Structural-normative

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Two books
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The institutionalised life course

• Individual life course problems are a matter of
  deep collective concern and much of the life
  course is explicitly and purposefully organized
  at the collective level in modern society.
  Improper or inarticulate sequencing, or unjust
  transitions or inattention to individual
  development rights, become major problems and
  institutions arise to manage them properly. The
  cultural rules of the life course are central
  elements of these and other major institutions.
• (Meyer, 1988 58, original emphasis)

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Normality from womb to tomb

• Birth
• Childhood
• Youth
• Adulthood
• Old age
• Death and dying

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Disability and normal life?

• a personal trouble
• a biographical disruption
• a transgression of cultural rules
• an administrative and social problem
• a structural challenge

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Disability? Its life Jimbut not as we know it
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A generational system?

• The assumption of the pervasiveness of the gender
  system implies that all social relations are
  gendered Can we accept that all kinds of
  social phenomena are not only gendered but
  generationed as well?
• (Alanen, 1994 37)

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An adult centred system?

• Independent adulthood is the key to inclusion and
  relative advantage, whilst childhood, youth and
  later life are characterised as socially
  disadvantaged or marginalised positions. life
  course stages, in particular as they cleave
  around the tripartite division between childhood
  (and youth), independent adulthood and later
  life, appear to have a new significance as
  dimensions of inequality.
• (Irwin, 1999 692)

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The independence cycle
independence
time
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Power, status and politics

• Structural change political economy
• Cultural rules identity and representation
• Social claims politics and social movements
• (economic, symbolic and social capital?)

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Adulthood

• Independence
• Competence
• Autonomy
• A uniquely work-able condition

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Generational rights and responsibilities

• Adults responsibility to labour in production
  and reproduction rights to autonomy and
  self-determination
• Non-adults exemption from productive and
  reproductive adult labour a loss of rights to
  autonomy and self-determination

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Work and employment

• Only when all physically impaired people of
  working age are as a matter of course helped to
  make whatever contribution they can in ordinary
  work situations, will secure foundations for full
  integration in society as a whole be laid. All
  the other situations from which physically
  impaired people are excluded are linked, in the
  final analysis, with the basic exclusion from
  employment.
• (UPIAS, 1976 15-16)

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• Childhood and later life are positioned, in
  cultural representations and in social and
  institutional constructions, as dependent
  statuses and as social locations that deny
  children and those in later life full social
  participation or a proper measure of dignity. In
  contrast, independent adulthood is positively
  valued, carrying social status and prestigeThere
  is a clear parallel, in these constructions, with
  the positioning of disabled experiences in modern
  society.
• Irwin (2001 18)

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Non-adult categories

• Childhood
• Old age
• Disability?

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A life course approach?
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An adult-centred politics?

• Do disability policies and politics reproduce the
  inequalities of an adult-centred generational
  system?
• Is there a political commonality with the rights
  of children and older people?
• Is a society for all ages also an enabling
  society?

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• Dr Mark Priestley
• Centre for Disability Studies
• University of Leeds
• www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies