I have read some of the original material and it is does not fit with some our current autistic
notions of advocacy.
I was not the one who said it was a Nazi ideology, but it is certainly like a lot of models overly
culturally specific to western modes of thinking.
Again it accords with what I have said before metaphorically and perhaps whimsically about the
anthropologists insisting that the natives of borneo wear a pair of levi's instead of a penis gourd
to meet western sensibilities.
I enjoyed once seeing David Attenborough's discomfiture when the boot was on the other foot so to
speak, he had to wear the native garb to attend certain ceremonies :)
In autistic terms, normalisation would be part of a paradigm which discourages or attempts to
extinguish behaviours such as stimming, and rocking (as in the ABA protocols of Lovaas)
The thinking may come from the right direction, but it is deeply flawed.
Larry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of miles
> Sent: 10 September 2008 00:54
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Nordic / welfare model
>
> .
> No. The original idea of 'Normalisation' did not mean what
> Larry (and many others before him) seems to think. It was
> not a well chosen term in English, so it's not surprising
> that it gave rise to a lot of misunderstanding. The ideas
> involved in it were part of a battle from the 1960s to the
> 1980s to get away from the earlier practice and ideology of
> 'putting people away' in large institutions (where the daily
> lives they lived tended to depart sharply from the normal
> everyday lives and opportunities enjoyed by 95-98% of other
> people in their city, town or village); and instead to find
> new ways of accommodating people with special needs and
> differences, so that, to the greatest extent possible, they
> would continue to enjoy, or would newly acquire, the ordinary
> and normal freedoms and choices and aspects of life like
> anyone else of their age, gender, tastes and interests, while
> also having access to any special facilities, equipment,
> assistance or whatever, arising from their impairments or
> disabilities.
>
> Wolfensberger did a lot towards practising and teaching and
> developing this new approach in the US, and after some time
> he saw that something more was needed (and he believed that a
> new piece of jargon was also needed, to describe it, and to
> move on from the misunderstandings generated by the term
> 'Normalisation'). He saw that there was a need for people
> with disabilities to have some roles in society that would
> have some positive value -- this was necessary for the
> individual's self-esteem, and it was also necessary for
> shifting social attitudes toward making new place and space
> (i.e. for people who had not previously had much visibility,
> because either they were 'put away' in an institution, or
> they were keeping out of sight at home, or they had figured
> out ways of 'passing' invisibly in their local community).
> He hit on the phrase 'social role valorisation' -- again, not
> a brilliant piece of PR work, but it had some meaning, and
> the ideas behind it continue to be needed in all societies
> that I've ever seen or studied.
>
> I'm not particularly keen on Wolf and his ways of going about
> things, but in the 1970s and 1980s he was a major influence
> in the development of social thinking and practice in North
> America (with some influence also in Western
> Europe) that opened up the way for millions of disabled
> people to have choices and opportunities much beyond what was
> available when Wolf and his generation were young. After the
> 1980s, he continued campaigning against what he saw as a lot
> of 'death-making' tendencies within 'western'
> societies. In this phase, I think he was probably right in
> many of his targets, but his thinking did not perhaps engage
> sufficiently with the various new waves of thinking and
> ideology that were coming up in the Disabled People's
> organisations. He was fighting good battles, but the younger
> armies were marching to different tunes.
>
> Wolf wrote copiously about his thoughts and campaigns. It's
> really not very difficult to find some of his stuff and read
> it, and learn that 40-50 years of his work can't easily be
> boiled down to two or three paragraphs, because there was a
> good deal of complexity in it, informed by experience of
> trying to put the ideas into practice, and battling with
> powerful and deeply entrenched forces that had an interest in
> keeping everything bolted down. A benefit of reading what he
> actually wrote, is that that the reader would not make the
> mistake of imagining that Wolfensberger was an advocate of
> eugenics, or Nazi ideologies, or banging people into one size
> of box and cutting off any bits that didn't fit. He spent his
> life fighting against that kind of stuff.
>
> miles
>
>
> On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 16:45:24 -0500, John H Noble Jr
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
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