Uppeldi og menntun - 01.07.2014, Qupperneq 88

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 23(2) 201488
Behind the qUest for tales, stories and liVes
In the 1960s there was questioning ‘of the legitimacy of official and institutional cul-
tural authorities’ (Gerber, 1990, p. 3). In that social and historical context, traditional
research which treated people with intellectual disabilities as passive subjects increas-
ingly aroused criticism (Whittemore, Langness & Koegel, 1986). A growing body of
narrative literature suggests that people with intellectual disabilities have important
stories to tell and can, with appropriate support, take part in research as collaborators
and narrators. These studies have contributed to the growing plethora of oral histo-
ries, stories, accounts, personal perspectives, narratives, and vignettes associated with
the study of intellectual disabilities (e.g., Atkinson, 2004; Carson & Docherty, 2002;
Goodley, 1996, 1999, 2000; Johnson & Traustadóttir, 2005; Walmsley, 2002). Further-
more, research over the past few decades has brought the perspectives of disabled
people into research, practice and policy related to the amelioration of the exclusion
of people so labelled (Barnes, Barton & Oliver, 2002). This new strand of disability
research criticizes traditional research for colonizing disabled people’s lives and ex-
periences, as well as non-disabled professionals for claiming authority over disabled
people’s needs. Scholars (e.g., Atkinson, 1997; Rappaport, 1995) have also brought
attention to the risk of iterate negative stereotypes of victimization by selecting narra-
tives of exclusion and discrimination while developing an auto-biographical research
approach. This calls for reflexive research practices that attempt to unpack some of the
complexities and power relations of research and shed some light on the consequences
of this research; these consequences may not have been initially envisaged (by the
researcher) but still, nonetheless, they have a definite potency and significance.
This article responds to Pierre Bourdieu’s invitation to reflexivity (e.g., Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, p. 72). He asks that researchers take into account their presuppositions
and how their cultural and social background influences their interpretation of the
social world. In this article we reflect on some of our own narrative work with people
with intellectual disabilities. Our attention is not solely drawn to issues of method,
but also highlights the ways in which we understand the narratives we collect and the
narrators we work with. Furthermore, we explore how our narrative work has poten-
tially contributed to the construction of the label of intellectual disabilities.
tHEOrEtiCAl COntEXt
This paper is collaboration between three researchers: one from the UK and two from
Iceland. We address disability from a social perspective and reject the traditional
bio-medical and individualistic understanding of disability. However, we locate our-
selves in two distinct but related traditions. First, for two of us (Kristín and Hanna),
the narratives we present from Iceland are understood and analysed within the Nordic
Relational Approach to Disability. This is a common Nordic understanding of disability
rather than a uniform approach and is characterized by the emphasis on relations
between the environment and the disabled person (Traustadóttir & Kristiansen, 2004).
The Icelandic narratives of intellectual disabilities are placed in a Nordic context
where disability is understood as relational and caused by a discrepancy between