cover image: A history of special needs discourse

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A history of special needs discourse

18 Feb 2009

Pihlaja argues that the interrogatory approach practiced by many staff members in the study is indicative of “a weak understanding of the socio-emotional development level of these children and the means of providing support for them.”15. [...] In the act of asking such questions, which often contain evaluative or moral judgments of the child, the lack of staff knowledge is not experienced as such by the child – it is experienced instead as judgment and as a call to account, not just for a particular behaviour, but for how the child understands her or himself in the world. [...] In confronting the “freak,” what is at stake is not an experience of difference, but instead the viewing subject’s “own narcissism, the pleasures and boundaries of its own identity, and the integrity of its received images of self”30. [...] DISABILITY AND THE PROBLEM OF LIBERAL CITIZENSHIP It has become a commonplace in cultural theory to propose that the centre (i.e., the normal) is defined by the margin (i.e., the abnormal). [...] Margins exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive limit of whatever power the center consigns itself.32 Mann’s framework employs a rather fatalistic tone, but its characterization of the ways margin and centre function to “position” those on the margin at a point of “silence,” that the center defines its boundary through exclusions of others to the margin, and that the
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Authors

Ellison, Carmen

Pages
35
Published in
Canada

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