Pregunta 10

Disabled students move, interact, shape spaces and occupy places in university settings. Bodies are able to navigate and explore the academy as well as being contained and isolated in various institutionally encoded spaces. Impaired bodies challenge the realities of conventional able-bodied practices and norms and require rethinking ways all people occupy spaces (see Hansen & Philo, 2007). Tremain (2008), for example, states:

From a Foucauldian perspective, disability and impairment neither refer to, nor represent, essences of particular individuals or of a certain population at large. On the contrary, these terms refer to a decentered subject position that is the product of the movement of power. This conception of power and its linkage to the body

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offers a way to explain the practices of subjectification that have variously separated, institutionalized, and normalized disabled people. (p.81-82) Tremain’s work highlights the extent to which disability as a specific domain of

knowledge-power relations is a product of modernist bio-power and medical discourses aimed at the management of ‘impaired’ individuals.

Bodies are expected to act and move in certain ways in particular times, spaces and contexts. Foucault (1977) also offers insights into how the human body worked upon, normalized and moulded to be productive:

The body is also directly involved in the political field, power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs…it is largely as a force of

production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination…the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and subjected body. (p.25-26)

Thus, a Foucauldian lens is useful to better understand how disabled bodies and mad subjects are confined, segregated, distributed and worked upon in educational institutional settings. According to Foucault (1995) power relations invest in bodies, work upon them, mark them and force bodies to carry out tasks, ceremonies and emit signs. He asserts that bodies are individualized in relations that distribute bodies, render them visible, differentiated and comparable. For Foucault (1995) the body is disciplined and punished in ways to maximize the labour exerted out of bodies:

The systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even

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when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement and correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission. (p. 25)

Thus, disabled and mad persons are made to work in the academy, to be productive and complete academic work in ways that parallel economic, factory and workplace regimes of production. In this sense, this study is concerned to examine how disabled students are distributed, confined and corrected in relation to ableist norms and values. In university settings, mad and disabled students may be made visible or rather inscribed and

constituted as particular sorts of subjects through official policies and disciplinary procedures that are informed by such policies. It is this critical examination of the institutional practices that compare and differentiate all students and which pays particular attention to how disabled and mad students are impacted by power and socio- spatial embodied relations which is the focus of this study. In this sense, Foucault’s analytic work allows for an examination of how disabled and mad bodies are worked upon and how institutional policies and practices may invest in such bodies to render them increasingly productive.

Foucault (1995) shows how subjects are trained, disciplined, and regulated to become increasingly useful and productive in relation to socio-economic-political- military forces of labour. He comments “disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals” (p. 211) and refers to this practice as the political

technology of the body, where investment in knowledge of bodies, their functioning(s) and forces are calculated. Institutions and state apparatuses operate by harnessing the materiality of bodies and their forces in ways that support particular socio-economic and

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political aims. This requires knowledge and adjustments of the mechanisms of power to constantly frame the lives of individuals, adapt and refine machinery that surveys their lives, bodies, behaviours, movements, gestures, identity, and activities: “The disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary disqualify and invalidate”

(Foucault, 2005, p. 223). Individuals become part of functions aimed at production, knowledge transmission, diffusion of skills and aptitudes. The ways mad and disabled students are distributed, controlled and moved, understood in relation to other bodies and made to transmit skills is an important consideration and contribution of this study. It is in this sense that I examine how mad and disabled subjects’ bodies are worked upon by disciplinary power and how mad and disabled students productively work upon

themselves in ways that may challenge regimes that structure ways of socio-spatio- temporal being and behaving.

Foucault (1995) also discusses signs and characteristics attributed to bodies and their professions, where individuals adopt particular postures, body types and forms, and movements. For example, he discusses how the body of the soldier is fashioned, shaped, trained, manipulated, constructed, corrected, habituated and made pliable, obedient, responsive, alert and automated: “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (p. 136). Thus, different bodies are brought into correct posture, organized distributed and made mechanistic and productive. Disabled and mad persons also can be understood as targets to be transformed, corrected, and improved by medical/clinical/pedagogical interventions in order to learn, work, communicate, respond and function according to able bodied norms and also those related to mental health.

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According to Foucault (2005), for example, individuals are qualified by pedagogical practices, separated by graded examinations, and evaluated as they progress through a series of supervised exercises of increasing difficulty. Interventions are aimed at differentiation, correction, punishment, or elimination where individuals are

characterized as they progress through a series of successive activities. The power to punish is not much different from that of educating which gives authority to supervise, transform, correct, and improve. Foucault (2005) demonstrates that exercise is an effective way to train bodies:

Exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated…exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual either in relation to this term, in relation to other individuals, or in relation to a type of itinerary. (p. 161)

Thus, through the use of timetables, pedagogical expectations and repetitive training, prescribed movements, disabled students are characterized and trained in relation to other individuals. Disabled students are thus expected to act, learn, communicate and move in particular ways in university settings. For example, a student with a mobility impairment may be expected to arrive at a class across campus in a timely manner with little

consideration of barriers or obstacles that may limit a students’ ability to negotiate the built and changing campus environment. Flows of students and people in high traffic areas may create difficulty in navigating certain areas of campus environments in a normalized timely fashion in the ways nondisabled, non-mobility impaired individuals may move.

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Foucault (2005) discusses exercise as part of the political technology invested in the body where bodies may also be grouped in assemblages in combination with other bodies, moved and articulated in mobile spaces. In this sense, university practices are conceptualized as demonstrating elements of exercises such as “initiation, ritual, preparatory ceremony, theatrical rehearsal or examination” (p.161). University ceremonies, events and expectations such as examinations involve the allocation of numerous bodies in a particular localized institutional space. Disabled students may be asked to be in certain locations during these events to be included or alienated. For example, the use of a laptop during an examination may require that the student with a disability remain in another separate room apart from the student population taking the exam. Classroom spaces might also have accessibility issues where for example, a student with a mobility impairment may be asked to be at the front, side, back of the classroom or locate themselves in a particular place due to instructor pedagogy,

classroom architecture and possible sound and sight considerations for individuals who may have hearing or visual (sensory) impairments.

For Foucault (1995) discipline, segregation, enclosure, and socio-spatial distribution are connected. As Foucault (1995) attests, contained bodies are easier to monitor, measure, discipline, and render useful:

Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tense to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must

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individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous

coagulation…Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space…Even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular. (p. 143)

The socio-spatial organization of disabled people in spaces is therefore a necessary aspect of disciplinary power and propagating disciplined individuals.

Spaces are architecturally designed and coded to order communications and activities (Foucault, 1995). Individuals are ranked and arranged in spaces, not in a fixed position but distributed and circulated in a network of relations. Educational spaces become homogeneous and rank defines educational orders. Thus, hierarchical

observation is a key element of training and discipline and has spatial ramifications in terms of how bodies are positioned within institutions. Disabled students are ranked by performance, grades and may be expected to communicate, move and work in normalized ways.

Educational spaces allow for supervision, hierarchizing, and rewarding. Foucault (1995) shows the relationship between spatiality and discipline:

Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations. (p. 146)

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Educational buildings are designed and arranged as apparatuses for perpetual

observation. Foucault (2005) links supervision to the economic productive machinery aimed at creating knowable, industrious and productive individuals that contribute labour and economic capital. He illuminates how education may be targeted at creating

disciplined and reformed individuals:

One can imagine the power of the education which, not only in a day, but in the succession of days and even years, may regulate for man the time of waking and sleeping, of activity and rest, the number and duration of meals, the quality and ration of food, the nature and product of labour…the use of speech and even, so to speak, that of thought...regulates movements of the body, and even in moments of rest, determines the use of time, the time-table… (p. 236)

Knowledge of individuals through perpetual assessment allows for greater ordering and training of individuals leading to greater efficiency. However, disabled students may experience that they may be expected to navigate the university landscape in certain ways and times as prescribed by able-bodied ways of moving, knowing, doing and acting. Thus, efficiency as defined by able-bodied norms and expectations may place emphasis on doing things faster than disabled students might do similar things, movements, communications, responses to inquiries, complete tasks, assignments, tests and other duties. Thus, discipline is targeted at increasing productivity, skills and aptitudes of individuals, speeds of output and turning bodies into machinery aimed at developing bodies to make ‘useful’ individuals closely tied to economic productivity.

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