Sticky Categories and Their Negative Consequences c/o Mikulak et al.
Category - Theory and Practice
Hodges' model -
A model for care in whatever situation, care environment*.
A model for care in whatever situation, care environment*.
Individual
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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
HUMANISTIC -------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
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Group
'I' Me My name is . . . I am a person. I am an individual. Even if I don't thank you, there may be someone out there who thanks you for acknowledging, confirming, sustaining, preserving and respecting my identity. Even if I don't ask you for your name please share it with me, when you feel the time is right. Together ... | [Abstract] "‘Behaviours that challenge others’ are attributed to 20% of people with learning disabilities. These behaviours are not a diagnosis, it is something people are labelled with. We conducted qualitative interviews with social care staff in the UK within four models of care: independent supported living, residential nursing home, Shared Lives, and living with family and attending a day opportunities centre*. We examine how the category of ‘behaviours that challenge others’ is produced, applied, and contested in adult social care settings. We demonstrate its stickiness and discuss its stigmatising consequences. How behaviours are understood, felt, and talked about matters for the support people with learning disabilities receive and maps onto their consequent inclusion or exclusion from society. We point out the harms the category carries for people who receive it and argue that it should be abandoned." p.110. |
"Labeling theory suggests that labels lead to stigma, through changing how a group is perceived by others and supporting stratification (Haft et al. 2023). According to Link and Phelan (2001: 383), stigma ‘exists when elements of labeling, stereotyping, separating, status loss, and discrimination co-occur in a power situation that allows these processes to unfold’ (emphasis added). The acceptance of categories as valid and important differences is described by the labeling element of stigma (Link and Phelan 2001). Here, we attend to how this ‘labeling’ aspect of stigma interacts with its other mechanisms in the category of ‘behaviours that challenge others’." p.112. | "Emotions are not private, rather, they ‘circulate between bodies and signs’ producing meanings and creating ‘the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds’ (Ahmed 2004b: 117); thus, affect is always distributed (Wetherell 2015). We propose the category—and the labeling process behind it—should be understood within an ableist (Campbell 2009) distribution of affect and politics of emotion; one that subordinates the experiences of people with learning disabilities through establishing the ‘truth’ of the reading as external and mediated through the emotions of people without learning disabilities. ‘Behaviours that challenge others’ (and synonyms of the category) are inherently relational but also reflect and reproduce existing power imbalances. We suggest their stickiness rehearses and reinforces the ableist politics of emotion that positions people with learning disabilities as ‘less human’ (Goodley 2021) and at times as monstrous. The category is a product of this politics, one that repeats its rehearsed, sticky associations, making the reading of the proximity of people with learning disabilities in the present a result of histories marked by dehumanization. The method of categorizing people through labels also makes them more susceptible to what McClimens has described as ‘reauthoring’, with collective histories ‘presented in a way that condones or even justifies their current situation’ (2007: 259)." p.113. |
DOI: https://doi. org/10.16993/sjdr.1069 (with my emphasis)
I have cited Mikulak et al. in 1/2 papers submitted yesterday after revision on: threshold concepts, deprivation of liberty, residential care and Hodges' model.
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
