The Possibilities of Failure

Intellectual Disability

“…Research on Africa further suggests something parallel to the emergence of the notion of intellectual disability in the Global North. Colonial and postcolonial demands for the creation of school systems, new expectations of literacy, and new regimes of testing created conditions that rendered children markedly disabled in a way that was not true for earlier circumstances, especially in rural settings (Whyte 1998;Livingston 2006;Zoanni 2020). This research also demonstrates that alternative forms of social organisation can create opportunities for those with intellectual disabilities: to be less conspicuous, to remain within relations of care, and to access relationships in which they are recognised as full persons.…”

“…Roman-Catholic venture in France and has become a federation of ecumenical, interfaith, small-scale residential communities across the world in which those with and without intellectual disabilities share life together (Cushing and Lewis 2002;McKearney 2017McKearney , 2018McKearney , 2019aAngrosino 2003;Zoanni 2019).…”

“…Within Uganda, for example, though people in rural areas may not have been exposed to understandings of intellectual disability from the Global North, they still articulate a highly elaborated and often stigmatising set of categories and terms for perceived cognitive impairment (Whyte 1998). In contemporary urban Uganda, understandings of intellectual disability are forged at the intersection of local models of the mind, longstanding patterns of kinship care, and newer forms of Christian charity (Zoanni 2018;. A person may only stand out as 'disabled' when they break particular social expectations about key features of personhood, such as by lacking the ability to speak or the capacity to be socially and biologically reproductive.…”

“…Outside kinship relations, dedicated care for people with intellectual disabilities is only available within a handful of primarily Christian institutions, which in turn reproduce models of highly paternalistic care that renders the cared-for as 'children'. At the same time, the category of the 'child' provides a socially legible status that affirms disabled people as deserving of care and resources (Zoanni 2019).…”

Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics, and traces

“…Here we train our attention on the complex, proliferating, ambiguous properties, times, effects, and affects of the tropes and events of failure, embracing plurality in our ethnographies of what failure variously enables, constrains, and renders invisible across multiple scales. We aim to hold the various modes of addressing failure, outlined above, in tension, following the contours of different forms of failure as they open out or preclude certain interventions and responses, are rejected or redefined (Zoanni 2018). This approach resonates with Dace Dzenovska's (2020) take on emptiness in the Latvian countryside, which has a sensual dimension, multiple explanatory narratives, and is the site of reconstituting ways of life and ideas about the future.…”