“WE CAN’T CLOSE IT YET”: HOW DISCOURSE POSITIONS PEOPLE WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Authors

  • Karen D. Schwartz

Abstract

In 2004, the government of Manitoba decided to spend $40 million to upgrade the Manitoba Developmental Centre, an institution housing people with intellectual disabilities. By examining local newspaper accounts of this story, I use discourse analysis as a means of uncovering how language works to position people with intellectual disabilities in certain ways. I rely upon Wolfensberger’s (1998) devalued social roles as an analytical framework to consider how our society understands and characterizes these individuals. I argue that within this discourse, people with intellectual disabilities have been cast into three devalued roles: as the object of paternalism, as the object of the professional gaze, and as the failed human. Keywords: People with intellectual disabilities, devaluation, devalued roles, discourse analysis, newspapers

Author Biography

Karen D. Schwartz

Doctoral Candidate Faculty of Education University of Manitoba

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Published

2010-09-29

How to Cite

Schwartz, K. D. (2010). “WE CAN’T CLOSE IT YET”: HOW DISCOURSE POSITIONS PEOPLE WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES. Critical Disability Discourses, 2. Retrieved from https://cdd.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cdd/article/view/23852

Issue

Vol 2 (2010)

Section

General

License

Authors retain copyright over their work and license their work for publication in Critical Disabilities Discourses under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivaties 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0). This means that the work is available for commercial and non-commercial use and reproduction provided that the original authors are credited and the original publication in this journal is cited, following standard academic practice.