Politics in Community: Conversations with Persons with Cognitive Disabilities

• In Event: Changing Perspective: Through the Lens of Disabiity

Abstract

Persons with cognitive disabilities are under-represented in political theory. Interviews that I have conducted can assist in moving their presence and contributions from the margins of politics and society to the center.

At L’Arche, some of the least privileged members of society have joined together to challenge contemporary power structures. People with cognitive disabilities (core members) and persons without disabilities (assistants) live together in radical community. This movement, started in the 1960s by Jean Vanier together with Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, two men with disabilities, strives to embody inclusive community. As a grassroots movement, L’Arche challenges existing neo-liberal power structures. L’Arche offers political lessons that transcend its small communal model. When politics is understood as working together for the common good, L’Arche’s inclusive community practice can be understood as more thoroughly and directly political than simply voting for a representative.

Through interviews with both L’Arche core members and assistants at L’Arche Trosly-Breuil, the founding L’Arche community in France, I seek to understand and analyze the distinctly political practices incorporated in L’Arche. These interviews ask about the contributions of persons with disabilities to the home, workplace, and other forms of associational life at L’Arche; I seek to understand the extent to which community members with disabilities are involved in making collaborative decisions about activities in each of these realms.

The inclusion of persons with disabilities at L’Arche means that persons with disabilities are collaborators in their own care and contribute to many (although not all) community decision-making practices. To facilitate this, L’Arche assistants seek new communication methods, including sign language for those who are not hard of hearing and pictograms, pictures that supplements words as a communication method. Moreover, working toward inclusion requires that L’Arche consistently reevaluates and expands its practices of inclusion, developing them over time. My interviews find that it is in the establishment of caring relationships that privilege listening to core members that assistants are better able to understand them. Institutional practices that are expected to be collaborative create space for this communication. The possibility of seeking to impose one’s will on others, however, remains; L’Arche designs (and redesigns) its institutions in ways that seek to minimize this.

Understanding L’Arche in its founding community in France also reveals other political insights: Through France’s generous funding support for organizations providing care for persons with disabilities, it both recognizes persons with disabilities’ need for support and recognizes care as a valuable activity. Conversely, however, government funding comes with some restrictions that, at times, conflicts with the ideals of community life, such as new regulations requiring community members to move to a nursing home immediately upon their retirement. Such regulations diminish the agency of the person.

Through an examination of the practices of L’Arche—as well as first-person accounts of life at L’Arche from persons with disabilities—insights into the development of more inclusive institutions outside of L’Arche can be gained. Moreover, L’Arche provides fundamental lessons about what it means to be human and how we can live together: Building on the ethics of care, L’Arche emphasizes reciprocal relationships as crucial to social and political life. L’Arche—a community of adults with and without disabilities—gives a unique insight into care among adults that the ethics of care’s focus on mother/child relationships misses. L’Arche reveals that relational care, while essential to the full inclusion that only comes from listening to the voices of others, must develop agency in others; a maternal intrusion on that agency must be avoided.

Author

• Lorraine Krall McCrary, Wabash College