Unravelling Mr. President's Nomad Lands: Travelling to Interdisciplinary Frontiers of Knowledge in Disability Studies
Griet Roets, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Welfare Studies, Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
In this article, my aim is to unearth the ways in which binary and essentialist ontological assumptions surrounding the impairment category of 'learning difficulties' have been previously conceptualized on the level of social theory and practice. My desire to engage in innovative, praxis-oriented theorizing springs from my intensely felt participation in the new social movement of self-advocacy in Flanders (Belgium) over the last ten years. From this privileged position, I ground my participative knowledge production with self-advocates in critical feminist disability studies that can benefit from unravelling the nomadology and social process ontology of the poststructuralist feminist Rosi Braidotti (1994, 2002, 2006a, 2006b). Travelling to interdisciplinary frontiers of knowledge in disability studies brings the nomadic subjectivity of the president of the self-advocacy network in the public eye, who subverts the unitary view of a human subject deviant from the abstract standard of 'normal man'.