Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CHAPTER 2
Therefore, critical theoretical researchers seek to uncover political and structural
dimensions of research; and to articulate different frameworks of social relationships
in terms of their ethical implications. 98
A conceptual theoretical analysis, in the context of this research, also accounts
for experience. This research is embedded in passion gained from personal
experience. As a woman, as a person of a lower class background, as a person who
has been employed in various human services; and as a person who was a cohouse-parent
for four years to five young people with intellectual disability in
suburban community, I share the experiences and the challenges of marginalisation.
Yet I also know the richness for having had these and many other experiences. I
know the joy of being in relationship with people who are different, though
similarly human. I know that through accepting relationships of mutuality and
solidarity, referential acts of inclusion become irrelevant; and integrality in
community is an achievable goal. Therefore, with these experiences, I can situate
myself as co-subject, and acknowledge the influence of my experiential knowledge. I
insert my womanly voice and view into the commentary. With a hermeneutics of
suspicion towards hegemonic constructions, I undertake a feminist position in
questioning. 99 This experience, juxtaposed with formal scholarship of nursing
training, social science and textual studies provides a rich multidisciplinary
medium by which to contextually explore the ethical significance of inclusion.
Having stated these contentions, this research is also qualitative and multidimensional.
As a framework of qualitative research, I call on the recent work of
Yvonne Lincoln and Norman Denzin. 100 From a collection of thirty-five works,
Lincoln and Denzin, in the concluding chapter, highlight a tension that now defines
qualitative research. They contend that there is an illusive centre to what can be
described as a “contradictory, tension-riddled enterprise”. 101 This is a centre which
is presently moving further and further away from grand narratives, and single
overarching ontological, epistemological and methodological paradigms. They
claim that the “centre lies in the humanistic commitment of the researcher to study
the world always from the perspective of the interactive individual.” 102
Lincoln and Denzin, therefore, nominate six fundamental issues embedded in
these tensions. They describe these in their text as:
– Researchers continually wrestling with their research’s topic in relationship to
previous positivist and post-positivist formulations;
– Crisis of representation, speaking to the ‘other’ and its representation in our texts;
and
– Crisis of legitimation, whereby, in speaking to the ‘other’, the authority we claim
for our texts is challenged;
– The continued emergence of a cacophony of voices speaking with various agendas
from specific gender, race, class, ethnic and Third World perspectives (ability can
be included in this list);
– Throughout its history, qualitative research has been defined in terms of shifting
scientific, moral, sacred and religious discourses. Although since the Enlightenment,
science and religion have been separated if only at the ideological level, (for, in
practice religion has constantly informed science and the scientific practice), there
is now a more overt blurring of the boundaries as science moves away from its
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