Doctoral Degrees (Psychology)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Psychology) by Author "Capri, Charlotte"

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    Thinking about intellectual disability care : an intersubjective approach
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Capri, Charlotte; Swartz, Leslie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Psychology
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT : Of the many challenges facing persons with intellectual impairment in South Africa, disabling care continues to confront individuals who live and work with intellectual disability. Intellectual impairment care can be conceptualised as more than the performance of tasks involving giving and receiving, but can be understood as intersubjective and relational person-making exchanges that also unfold in broader socio-political spaces. Important voices have been marginalised in discourses on intellectual disability, and, in South Africa, traditional hegemonies of knowledge dominate thinking spaces that are yet to be taken up by the opinions of intellectually impaired individuals and care workers. Since experiences of care have been rarely voiced or validated by intellectually impaired individuals themselves, making and taking care should also refer to our capacity for reflection regarding our participation in many of its practices. This study opens up possibilities for fresh perspectives on psychiatric intellectual disability care by bringing together apparently disparate fields of relational psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity on the one hand, and contemporary models of disability on the other. The research collaboratively tracks the voices of its primary speakers, and touches on problematic aspects of care by foregrounding subjective experiences of living and working with psychiatric intellectual impairment, and by exploring the making of disabled and disabling care. It then becomes possible to see how dynamics of psychiatric intellectual disability care can both complicate and be addressed by a relational and intersubjective conceptualisation of ethical care. It was the task of the researcher, as scribe of this study, to facilitate conditions in which expert voices on intellectual disability care could be raised. In such intersubjective spaces the experience of impairment is no longer simply given or bestowed, but voiced by the real experts – those who live and work with intellectual impairment in a disabling world.