Things from independent study reading: Disability and Special Needs Education in an African Context
All human action is incomplete, partial, and characterised by contradictions, concealments and distortions...the meanings that are constituted by social practices (e.g. classification and labeling) often assume a life of their own (reification) and become cultural ideologies (or standards) for a host of value laden discriminatory practices (e.g. educational placement of students with mental retardation in restrictive settings)
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there is a distinct impression of shared perception between the Western agencies, national governments, and local education institutions that adoption of Western cultural ideologies in mental retardation is the natural course of things, much like the rise and setting of the sun
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the problem with charity is that it sees disability as an individual problem, not an institutional one
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knowledge as a material effect of power
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as a community of intellectuals and inquirers, we have to understand and unpack the conditions under which knowledge about disability is produced and reproduced.
R. Chimedza
Translate the last line to apply to all knowledge and that pretty much sums up spring quarter for me, which ends on Wednesday if I finish this damn paper that keeps boiling over in contradictions: a good thing, but a difficult thing to write eloquently.