Marco Teórico Referencial

theorise disability and higher education. Disabled students’ experiences, it is

argued, are constituted by power relations, embedded in the history and

mechanisms of institutions and their relationship between power and knowledge.

Foucault (1967) argues that power is not a possession or a capacity, nor should it be thought of as belonging to an individual or group, rather it is characterised by a network which threads and extends everywhere.

In relation to power/knowledge, Radford (2000, p.106) draws upon parallels

between the academy and the asylum. Radford, for example, suggests that they are both ‘creations of the Enlightenment’ and by comparison, states that:

The modern university evolved as a seat of learning and scholarship. At its best it has been a champion of [its] truth, outward-looking and cosmopolitan, its self-image

increasingly identified with a secular search for knowledge and truth in the interest of human progress. The asylum represents its antithesis, a closed world of ignorance and failure. (Radford, 2000, p.106, my insertion)

Radford describes the initial similarities, of the geographical locations of the university and the asylum, only later did they follow divergent paths. Ironically, as their ideals became incompatible, academic disciplines and related professions (especially law, education, medicine and psychology) assumed authority over the asylum. Radford argues that ‘the university lent powerful authority to arguments asserting the necessity for the incarceration of so-called mental defectives [sic] for the social good’ and that despite following apparent divergent paths the academy and the asylum were – and continue to be, albeit in a different guise – ‘closely interconnected’. For Radford (2000, p.121), the ‘academy remains part of the problem’. Indeed, when Radford (2000, p.108) made reference to research consistently producing negative views about individuals described as having

‘learning difficulties’ he also made the point that such views ‘are still rampant’ and

‘are still persistent and deeply embedded’ within the academy. Indeed the

experience of David Parson, a ward nurse, who appeared in the programme ‘Silent

Minority’ (1981), in his justification of the nurses’ role, said ‘... they’ve got to get through this’ and ‘... they’ve been told to do these things…’. Further still, comments by Mabel Cooper, who was incarcerated for 32 years in St Lawrence’s Hospital, said ‘In them days they said you wasn’t able enough to learn so you didn’t go to school … You weren’t allowed out of the hospital.’ One wonders, then, by whom have they ‘been told to do these things’ – the modern higher education institution?

Usher and Edwards (1994) argue that, given education is influenced by the values of Enlightenment, it is no surprise that such ‘grand narratives’ which sustain and

‘embody these values benefit the few and the cost of being paid most by’:

… the environment, by women, by black [and disabled people] and poor people. Many would argue that modern education in all its form, liberal progressive and

conservative, has been disabling rather than enabling.

(Usher and Edwards, 1994, p.31, my insertion)

The widening participation is a misleading discourse (Taylor, et al., 2005). Its discourse relates to: non-participation, under-representation, individual aspirations being raised, the role of careers, counselling and guidance services having a key role (C.Ball, 1990; Gutteridge, 2001), including ‘advice’ concerning DSA (DfES, 2005) and the issue of disclosure. For example, the OECD (2003, p.85) had urged HEIs to be proactive in taking reasonable action to encourage people to disclose their disability and, more generally, ‘to prevent, as far as reasonable, the

disadvantages that disabled students encounter during their course of study’.

However, Taylor et al. (2002, p.65) make a poignant point, suggesting that this

‘external discipline is replaced by self-discipline’, various forms of ‘confessional practices’ through the various techniques reveal ‘people’s inner lives are brought into the realm of power, through educating them to govern themselves’. It seems that the comments made by Oliver (1996, p.69) concerning social policy and welfare are applicable in this context, that ‘the price of those services is usually acceptance

on the invasion of privacy’ of services that modern higher education institutions

‘thinks you should have or is willing to pay for, rather than those that you know you need’ a form of socialisation into dependency. There are also connections with understanding the way power/knowledge incorporates individuals. No doubt this institutional gaze extends to the rising number of student complaints (OIA, 2007, 2012) and raises questions as to the role and purpose of an assumed ‘independent’

adjudicator. Indeed, what a Foucauldian power/knowledge complex offers is an understanding that lecturers, professors, adjudicators, counsellors are all instruments of surveillance, control, regulation, discipline, punishment and exclusion. Lecturers, professors, adjudicators, counsellors, and the like, have authority not because they have ‘knowledge’ but because they represent the

normative demands of society (Foucault, 1977, 1980). Power, perceived in this way, is subtle and effective, and operates at the level of ‘desire and also at the level of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980, p.59). This also extends to policy rhetoric. In relation to schooling, when Tony Booth (2000, p.92) referred to the term ‘SENCO’ being a discriminatory label, being carried around ‘like a bell summoning the ‘dull and backward’ to come forward and be identified’, one wonders if it was not necessarily implied just as a metaphor.

Further, Robertson and Hillman’s (1997) report, for example, on widening participation in higher education, adopts a ‘climbing frame’ metaphor where

students, particularly students from ‘lower socio economic groups and students with disabilities’, can ‘progress’ through a number of routes/roots to the award of an

‘honours’ degree (Greenbank, 2006, p.146). This tree-like ‘climbing frame’ is

hierarchical, imposing, vertical, regulated and spreads out into ‘many branches’ and assumes a single ‘trunk’ of ‘oneness’.

Similarly, using a Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari perspective makes Woodrow et al.’s (1998) ‘schooling’ as a metaphor for ‘prison’, which is not assumed to be accidental, all the more pertinent. This metaphor provides a graphic image of the different ways schools, intentionally or otherwise, discipline, control and punish

‘inmates’, to conform, reform and transform individuals to society’s non-disabled

‘norms’. Those who are considered as being ‘un-able’ are sent(enced) to the

‘segregation’ wing; of course in the interest of the other ‘inmates’, the gaolers, and for the ‘un-able’ themselves. Its goal is not to teach the ‘inmates’ something, but rather ‘to teach them nothing, so as to make sure that they could do nothing when they came out of prison’ (Foucault, 1980, p.42). Moreover, in the context of disability and higher education, the turn to a postmodernist perspective makes transparent the disciplinary technologies of modernity which are imbued with discourses of power/knowledge and normative interests.