Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the cover illustration
- A note on transcription notation
- Introduction
- 1 A discursive psychological approach
- 2 Intellectual disability as diagnostic and social category
- 3 The interactional production of ‘dispositional’ characteristics: or why saying ‘yes’ to one's interrogators may be smart strategy
- 4 Matters of identity
- 5 Talk to dogs, infants and …
- 6 A deviant case (written with Alec McHoul)
- 7 Some tentative conclusions
- Appendices
- References
- Index
1 - A discursive psychological approach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the cover illustration
- A note on transcription notation
- Introduction
- 1 A discursive psychological approach
- 2 Intellectual disability as diagnostic and social category
- 3 The interactional production of ‘dispositional’ characteristics: or why saying ‘yes’ to one's interrogators may be smart strategy
- 4 Matters of identity
- 5 Talk to dogs, infants and …
- 6 A deviant case (written with Alec McHoul)
- 7 Some tentative conclusions
- Appendices
- References
- Index
Summary
The conduct of persons becomes remarkable and intelligible when, as it were, displayed upon a psychological screen, reality becomes ordered according to a psychological taxonomy, abilities, personalities, attitudes and the like become central to the deliberations and calculations of social authorities and psychological theorists alike.
(Rose, 1999a: np)Reality enters into human practices by way of the categories and descriptions that are part of those practices.
(Potter, 1996: 98)Introduction
Intellectual disability is constructed in both ‘official’ discourses and everyday commonsense as an irretrievable ‘disorder’ of competence afflicting individual subjects, requiring professional diagnosis, treatment and management. This book deconstructs and critiques the social construction of intellectual disability through a detailed analysis of (i) a range of ‘official’ texts and (ii) the enactment of professional psychological practices.Primarily based in analysis of the talk-in-interaction of psychologists and people described as intellectually disabled, the book offers a contrasting view of these ‘incompetent’ social identities as the product of technological professional practices and knowledges. A secondary focus of the book is on the interplay and reproduction (intertextuality) of discourses of difference, deviance and incompetence in human/social policy rhetoric and in the (re)production of knowledge about intellectual disability in the psychological professions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability , pp. 8 - 29Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004