Citation

Bach M. Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 2017; 4(1): 4-25.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017)

DOI

10.1080/23297018.2017.1306794

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this article I argue that claims for full inclusion and citizenship for the growing number of people with significant intellectual, cognitive, and psycho-social disabilities are unrealised because of a cognitive ableism embedded in law, policy, and social practice that construes people as "cognitive foreigners", excluded from belonging on this basis. To explore how to sharpen and better advance full citizenship claims for this group it draws on Hannah Arendt's analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the lethal consequences of denying the "right to have rights" to certain groups made alien. It applies the trajectory she portrays-from rightlessness, to not belonging as a citizen, to having one's right to life itself threatened-as a lens, to examine: contests over disability rights; current struggles over legal recognition of a right to legal capacity and supported decision-making, which it suggests constitutes a basic "right to have rights"; and the legalisation of assisted suicide on the basis of intellectual, cognitive, and psycho-social disability, which comes to "makes sense" in a time of neo-liberal reason and state formation. To disrupt the logic of this trajectory, the article argues for a politics of inclusive citizenship that grows the work of supported decision-making for people with profound intellectual, cognitive, and psycho-social disabilities in actual communities, even as state and other interests contest and deny it legal recognition. Even if the state won't recognise this group's "right to have rights", proactive communities can. © 2017, © 2017 Australasian Society for Intellectual Disability.

Language: en

Keywords

assisted suicide; citizenship; Disability; legal capacity; supported decision-making