Author

Anna Hickey-Moody & Vicki Crowley

Year

2010

Publisher

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education T&F

DOI/Link

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01596306.2010.504358?casa_token=m9V945q911UAAAAA%3ArIItSS9IdNsIzAm3xIuSmcbiUArC8GgP85F5-HfPhmravGYsWRfSoGE_UVhWFMob0daw7ZSVcWjcgM0&__cf_chl_tk=cmCm0DwBaJOt6Ml9H42lqv5GMuYI2GQug__twuelX6I-1778953280-1.0.1.1-KCoFrbY2IBsEoCQ8SCgN8C1ZvLD1mznKE0L9L398Sf8

Abstract

This edition of Discourse comes into being after two decades of engagement with the
cultural politics of the body
through the arts, teaching, research and varied
encounters with ‘disability’ ranging from the very personal to the professional. From
the critique of ‘the medical model’ of disability undertaken during the early and mid1990s, a ‘social model’ emerged, particularly in the caring professions and those
trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and
schooling, it was a period of cementing inclusive practices and the ‘integration’ and
inclusion of disability into ‘mainstream’ (Northway, 2002; Vincent, Evans, Lunt, &
Young, 1996; Vislie, 2003). What was lacking in the debates around the social model,
however, were the challenges to abledness that were being grappled with in the
routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers
and caseworkers. Outside the academy, new forms of activity and new questions were
circulating. Challenges to abledness flourished in the arts and constituted the lived
experience of many disability activists. In the early 1990s, for instance, performing
arts companies such as the London-based CanDoCo and Restless Dance Theatre1 in
Adelaide, Australia, were making dance and redefining its boundaries as physically
based performance sourced in bodily capacity (in preference to disciplining the body
into extant genres of ‘the dancing body)

Keywords

MIL Pedagogy