Explore
What is day-to-day life like for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities who live in group homes? How do they express their desires and wishes? How do care workers think about them and treat them? Do they have basic rights to activities most of us take for granted: activities like sociability, sexuality, and moral affirmation?
Narrowed Lives is an illuminating portrait of what life is like in Finnish group homes where adults who have profound intellectual and multiple disabilities live their lives. Based upon ethnographic data, it documents how care workers strive to guarantee individuality and dignity against a backdrop of scarce resources and misguided policies. This book argues that the lives of people with profound disabilities need not be determined by their impairments. It calls for a re-evaluation of disability policy so that its underlying conviction of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities as equally valuable fellow humans would materialise in practice.
This novel and accessible book combines ethnography and philosophy, and will be of interest to researchers and students in disability studies, special education and philosophy, as well as parents, professionals and policy makers.
Endorsements from Readers
For people with profound intellectual and multiple impairments, what is a good life? Who is responsible for trying to ensure that such a life is possible? This sobering, no-nonsense book about individual people who live in Finnish care homes is a timely and vital contribution to thinking about both the possibilities and the limitations of care, empathy and moral engagement. — Don Kulick, Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, Uppsala University
This important book boldly challenges many pervasive and harmful assumptions about people with profound disabilities. Through powerful illustrations of how the external world can constrain, limit, and deny the worth of disabled persons, the authors confront difficult but essential questions that must be asked in order to combat ableism and enable flourishing.
By combining philosophical analysis with in-depth research into lived experience and relationships, this book is a call to critically reconsider how meaning is assigned, and how moral values are embodied in everyday practices. Narrowed Lives boldly asserts that the varied and complex lives of people with profound disabilities need not be narrow at all. — Licia Carlson, Professor of Philosophy, Providence College
Provocative… this book provides answers to questions of the human that unconsciously abound in any conception of intellectual disability and, crucially, urges all researchers to consider the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. — Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
- 24 - mobi (CC BY) at Unglue.it.
- 32 - epub (CC BY) at Unglue.it.
- 23 - pdf (CC BY) at Unglue.it.
Keywords
- anthropology
- Disability policy
- Disability: social aspects
- Education
- Ethics
- Ethics & moral philosophy
- ethnography
- Humanities
- Intellectual Disability
- Philosophy
- Profound intellectual and multiple disabilities
- Sexuality
- Social issues & processes
- Social services & welfare, criminology
- Social welfare & social services
- social work
- Society & culture: general
- Society & Social Sciences
- Sociology & anthropology
- Teaching of specific groups & persons with special educational needs
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBF Social and ethical issues::JBFM Disability: social aspects
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JK Social services and welfare, criminology::JKS Social welfare and social services::JKSN Social work
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JN Education::JNS Teaching of students with different educational needs
- thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTQ Ethics and moral philosophy
Links
DOI: 10.16993/bblweb: http://www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/site/books/m/10.16993/bbl/