"People with 'Learning Difficulties'"...

...in Corker, Mairian and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. New York: Continuum. 2002.

I'm working today and tomorrow on the prospectus and reading around. Something of interest from Dan Goodley and Mark Rapley's article "People with 'Learning Difficulties'" that would be relevant for a discussion on the construction of autism based on discursive and linguistic abilities. Specifically, Goodley and Rapley argue that "assumptions and ways of talking about disability [...] are crucial to the production of persons as incompetent. Both approaches point to the political consequences of these ways of talking: to the silencing of people with intellectual disabilities. Both approaches draw our attention to disability as a socially produced phenomenon in a social world, and social worlds, we argue, are worlds that can be changed" (127).

Also relevant: "We challenge both the modernist construction of 'learning difficulties' as naturalized impairment, and also demonstrate that phenomena frequently understood as aspects of social interaction" (127).

Goodley and Rapley's article focuses primarily those with 'learning difficulties' tendencies to acquiesce. Specifically, Goodley and Rapley challenge how the tendency to acquiesce, which is one significant "marker" or characteristic of the mentally challenged that is often used to justify how the "utterances of people with 'intellectual disabilities' are not to be trusted as veridical reports of their actions, beliefs, or feeling states" (128), is based on faulty methodological practices that assumed to be neutral or objective. Goodley and Rapley note that just as "language talks to the world into being, discursive psychology insists that (research) 'methods' are always and already 'theory' in disguise (128).

An interesting point for a discussion on the social construction of autism: "Discursive psychology [...] grants prior status to language : without the prior existence of language, such 'psychological' things 'intellectual (dis)abilities', 'syndromes' or acquiescence 'biases' can, quiet literally, not sensibly be talked of" (128). While G & R focus primarily on discursive analysis of transcriptions, I think G & R's statement illustrates well how rhetorical analysis can be applied to discussions on the "construction" of autism in the past 2 decades.