Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CONCEIVING A QUILT: CREATING A METHOD
nurture of such artifacts as memories, histories, stories, photographs and unconditional
close loving relationships are testament to that.
In many situations, therefore, inclusion is an ideal state – something imagined
and sought, not yet arrived at, but continuously strived for. This research contends
that not only do socio-ethical spaces of exclusion and inclusion exist, but also that
‘traditional’ socio-ethical spaces espoused to be inclusive, construe to sustain
structural exclusion for people with disability, particularly intellectual disability.
To elaborate, a conceptual theoretical and multidisciplinary approach will expose
the implicit exclusion within traditional methods, resulting in their inadequacy and
incompetency to address inclusion. The irony of this situation should not go
unnoticed. As has already been articulated, non-inclusion or exclusion for people
with intellectual disability has traditionally been explained because of the
perceived inadequacy and incompetency of these persons to be rational individuals.
However, I am suggesting that it is not a notion of impaired bodies that presents
barriers to Ethical Inclusion: rather, it is impaired ethical theorising. Therefore, I
assert that the fraudulence of aporetic ethical foundations in contemporary
disability practices must be confronted for ethical transformation.
Profound Exclusion and the notion of inclusion mapped under the three broad
categories – Technical Inclusion, Legislative Inclusion and Ethical Inclusion, embrace
different dominant themes of inquiry. For example, Profound Exclusion and Technical
Inclusion embrace a socio-historical positivist critique, Legislative Inclusion - a
socio-political interactionist, interpretavist or phenomenological critique, and Ethical
Inclusion – a socio-political-ethical-structuralist critique. Methodologically, these
different themes of inquiry cannot be ignored; but rather need to be embraced and
expanded to enable an adequate analysis of the conceptualisation and ethical
significance of the notion of inclusion to emerge. Undertaking a complex and
multidisciplinary approach recognises that the inclusion-exclusion dualism is
experienced not only within socio-temporal, socio-relational, socio-visual or sociopolitical
spaces, but also that these spaces together are components of a wider
embracing, but conceivably dominant and restrictive, socio-ethical space – a space
traditionally not embracing of the particularities of embodied identities. Diprose
reinforces this assertion when she states that ethics is often thought of as “either the
study of the logical status of our moral judgements or as setting down a set of
universal principles for regulating behaviour”, assuming that “individuals are
present as self-transparent, isolated, rational minds and that embodied differences
between individuals are inconsequential.” 114 Branson and Miller would contend,
then, that this approach to ethics constitutes “epistemic imperialism” for its embeddedness
in Western society and its propensity to organise ‘reality’ in a particular
way. This, they identify, necessitates an “unitary, logocentric, phallogocentric
orientation,” appropriating and devaluing ‘others’ by processes of “packaging,
labeling, and controlling.” 115 This indeed emerges as impaired ethical theorising.
On the other hand, though, Diprose contests that even if it is granted that ethics
is about moral principles and moral judgment, ethics is also about location, position
and place. This research will encompass this latter statement within its exploration
of the ethical significance of inclusion. It is imperative that the hegemonic genesis
of the traditional approaches to applied ethics and the legitimacy of their orthodoxy
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