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Recent Work in Disability History
Pieter Verstraete of Belgium sends news of completing his dissertation at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, “Disability History: A Foucauldian Perspective.”
Pieter Verstraete, Disability history: A Foucauldian perspective.
Doctoral thesis submitted to obtain the degree of Doctor in Educational Sciences, May 2008.
Supervisors: Prof. Walter Hellinckx & Prof. Marc Depaepe
In this doctoral dissertation we have focussed on a domain of study which only recently attracted the attention of history of education scholars: The history of the education and instruction of people with disabilities. On the one hand, we aimed at highlighting the importance of raising methodological issues within this new and challenging field of educational history. On the other, we also wanted to offer the reader some possible histories of disability itself. In this way, the doctoral dissertation can be divided into two parts. The first two chapters can be said to be merely methodological whereas the last three chapters can be said to have a more historical nature.
Within the existing educational historiography the notion of ‘disability’ receives increasing attention. In line with an Anglo-Saxon research tradition – i.c. the American perspectives on disability history – ‘disability’ here more and more is considered an effective instrument for historical inquiry into the nature, role and functioning of specific power mechanisms in the history of educational spaces like e.g. the school, the asylum, the institute, the family etc. According to this particular Anglo-Saxon research tradition writing the history of disability is thought to be a decisive element in both the emancipation, liberation of people with disabilities and the realization of an inclusive society. We are convinced that nowadays still many people with disabilities on a regular basis can be encountered in situations of oppression and discrimination. The identification and condemnation of these degrading contexts has to remain an important task for the historian of disability. Nevertheless, the first two chapters reflect critically on the particular way this Anglo-Saxon tradition uses our past in order to liberate and emancipate people with disabilities – and its particular use of concepts like critique, past and history in this endeavour. Here, the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault functioned as the most importance source of inspiration. On the basis of his ideas about writing a history of the present, his innovative concepts of power and his particular interpretation of the notion ‘experience’ we have tried – parallel to our critique – to construct an alternative methodological framework for writing the history of the education and instruction of people with a disability. Instead of striving for a radical liberation of persons with a disability, our alternative approach of history – i.c. a dis-abling history – directs the attention of contemporary scholars towards the ideas, values and convictions of the author of a disability history himself. At the heart of this doctoral thesis thus can be found a substitution of a Messianic promise to the other – i.c. the person with a disability – for an unceasing Foucauldian critique of the self and the present.
In the second part of this doctoral thesis we have tried by means of our alternative methodological framework to write a few histories of disabilities ourselves. For this we made extensive use of the several libraries and archives of the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds (Paris), the Association Valentin Haüy (Paris) and the Koninklijk Instituut Spermalie (Bruges). The focus of these histories lies on the representations of and the intercourse with people with mental, auditory and visual disabilities. Successively the role phrenology played in the emergence of educational initiatives for people with intellectual disabilities, the transformations in the care for people with visual and auditory disabilities between 1750 and 1860 and finally the problemization and pedagogization of disability towards the end of the eightteenth century was studied. On the one hand, all of these particular histories try to contribute to the existing corpus of disability history by revealing new turns, sources and perspectives. On the other, however, all of these histories also aim at the identification of historical elements which can enlighten critically our current intercourse with people with disabilities.
It is, according to us, exactly by pointing towards those elements which for us became to visible in order to be conceived, that the writing of disability histories can possibly contribute to the emancipation of persons with disabilities. We however do not consider emancipation as the promise of a powerless space in which a new truth can rule accordingly. On the contrary, emancipation here is thought to be a process of change which starts on oneself and creates alternative spaces where new truths, other ways of being and unforeseen possibilities can emerge unboundedly.
© The Disability History Association, 2008