Workshop: Disability and (Virtual) Institutions?

Disability and (Virtual) Institutions?: Interventions, Integration and Inclusion

On 21-22 June 2018, scholars from Australia, Spain, Indonesia, Canada, and  the United Kingdom will participate in a workshop at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (co-organised by LHJ member Linda Steele) to explore institutions and institutionalisation in contemporary legal contexts. Workshop participants include LHJ members Isabel  Karpin, Karen O’Connell and Linda Steele.

From the 1970s a number of western jurisdictions moved people with disability out of institutional settings and into the community. This workshop interrogates the extent to which contemporary laws and social policies towards people with disability reinstate, continue or legitimate historical practices associated with institutionalisation and communal housing of people with disability.

The workshop will involve each participant closely examining a particular contemporary law or social policy issue, in the context of interdisciplinary theories, international human rights, and broader historical and political trajectories of people with disability. It will be particularly attentive to how purportedly progressive ideas of ‘community’, ‘access’, ‘support,’ ‘participation,’ ‘integration’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘recovery’ might have been harnessed by law and social policy in a way that has hindered the rights, wellbeing and equality of people with disability. Ultimately, the workshop will interrogate whether current circumstances, in which law is complicit, have resulted in ‘virtual’ institutional conditions.