Logics of Civic Possibility: Exploring the Legacy of Steve Taylor

• In Event: Tracing the Bold Lines Drawn by Steven J. Taylor

Abstract

Overview
Among its many contributions, Steve Taylor’s work decisively challenges logics of exclusion employed by educational scholars and public service professionals to justify the outsider status of individuals labeled with intellectual disabilities. In doing so, Taylor advances what I call “logics of possibility” for democratic inclusion. Applying Taylor’s research to philosophical inquiry on civic education, this paper explores what the epistemological and ethical dimensions of Taylor’s work teach us about theorizing citizenship and logics of civic possibility.

Objectives
I begin by considering Taylor’s method of dismantling the logics of exclusion behind the concepts of disability and intelligence. For Taylor, the category “intellectually disabled” reaffirms a stigmatizing and invented social position that is a reflection of changeable social norms. Dismantling the label involves a two-pronged attack: first, revealing the dehumanizing consequences of that label and its construction of target individuals as “other,” and, second, showing the logical contradictions inherent in the label itself and in its application and practice within social institutions. The latter prong is a particularly sharp one in Taylor’s work: because it takes aim at the conceptual flaws in reasoning about the treatment and care of people labeled with intellectual disabilities, it also challenges the frequent accusations of ideological bias lodged at those who advance inclusion.

Scholarly Significance
Taylor’s work shows that to avoid logics of exclusion, the trajectory of philosophical inquiry must begin not with abstract normative claims about ability and disability, but rather with the situated experiences of individuals whose socially interpreted characteristics place them on the margins of society. Situated epistemologies ground ethical inquiry. The first-person narrative “provides a platform from which different conceptions of the nature of human behavior can be given force in both the academic and larger community” (Bogdan and Taylor, 1994, p. 20). This procedural point is both methodological and political, and is informed by a deep commitment to the belief that research that confirms and indeed creates exclusions cannot be ethical in the proper sense.

Structure
Taking these epistemological and ethical stances, I turn to philosophical theorizing about citizenship. Much philosophical inquiry on citizenship education posits the necessity of threshold competencies for citizenship. In doing so, these frameworks place qualifying conditions for membership in the democratic community and tacitly exclude many people labeled with intellectual and other cognitive disabilities. Taylor’s work shows that the conceptual process that leads to this exclusion is backwards. For Taylor, the definition of the person, or indeed of the citizen, “is to be found in the relationship between the definer and the defined and is not determined by the abstract meanings attached to the group of which the person is part” (2000, p. 84). Rather than exploring qualifying conditions or delineating competencies in advance, Taylor points to the importance of beginning with the problematic of citizenship itself: How might schools advance valued states of belonging, participation, and humanness? What can be learned from the enabling relationships that already exist? I argue that Taylor’s work prompts philosophical inquiry on democratic citizenship education that engages logics of possibility in place of logics of exclusion.

Author

• Ashley Taylor, Colgate University