The core notion of social inclusion as I develop it in this paper is that societal institutions should be organized to provide valued recognition to diverse groups, to the ‘others’ often marginalized by a dominant political culture and social and political institutions. This means that arrangements should not systematically devalue certain groups, or allocate the benefits, status, and advantages that such institutions are designed to provide, in ways that misrecognize certain groups and disadvantage and stereotype them in relation to others. Nor should arrangements foster or fund forms of recognition that deepen and entrench the social distance between certain groups (e.g. residential and education segregation of disabled persons would not survive such a test). Socially inclusive arrangements would help to nurture paths of mutual recognition that close the distance in ways that bring respect and value for the differences that define us.
Conceiving of social inclusion in this way, we can understand how the idea is sometimes used as a political claim for full citizenship, or as an ideal to which societal organizations and institutions should aspire, or to name the process of reform of such arrangements. There are many institutional arrangements to which the claims, ideal, and process of social inclusion could apply - for example, early childhood development services, recreation services, education, family support services, labour market training, arrangements that provide benefits through the tax system and by other means, and even those institutions that regulate, fund, and undertake social and health research on human populations (e.g. the Human Genome Project), etc. Simply stated, such institutional arrangements should be inclusive, we should be able to examine the extent of their social inclusivity, and we should be able to launch a process of reform that we might call social inclusion.
In this paper I consider how this understanding of social inclusion could help to advance, in particular, the well-being of children with disabilities in Canada. I do not consider social inclusion a new idea or agenda. There have been long struggles by many groups to be included among those granted benefit and advantage by the state and major institutions of society. But with claims for social inclusion becoming louder in many quarters, advancing understandings of inclusion that could help to guide responses to such calls should be a priority for public policy and governance at all levels of our society.
Three main contentions guide my thinking for this paper. First, over the past few years there have been many calls from within the disability movement nationally and internationally to advance a new agenda of inclusion with its variants of education inclusion, labour market and workplace inclusion, and community inclusion. At their core, these calls are for people with disabilities to be recognized and valued as full citizens regardless of their particular differences. The vision of citizenship a call for inclusion appeals to goes beyond the exercise of political rights, and social and economic claims on the state. It demands social, cultural, political and economic participation in all institutions of society. Calls for educational, workplace, and community inclusion are consistent with the shifts in theories of citizenship that moral and political philosophers are pointing to - citizenship is fundamentally about full and democratic participation and inclusion in the institutions of society.
Why these calls now? I suggest they are emerging as the dilemma of the ‘rights revolution’ becomes clear. The valued recognition and status that rights are supposed to provide to all those who possess them has not been forthcoming for many groups. Children with disabilities are the focus of this paper, and their exclusions persist. For a social inclusion agenda to be effective in the current context - of rights expanded and exclusion entrenched - we must clarify what it offers to advancing our understanding of citizenship and human rights.
Second, if there is no simple equation between rights and recognition, then an adequate concept of social inclusion should begin with an understanding of what valued recognition entails. Jurisprudence on the nature of equality rights, and an adequate theory of recognition are useful places to begin. With the analysis I outline in this paper, I suggest that a social inclusion agenda in the current times must build on a human rights strategy and could be usefully characterized as a ‘social inclusion as solidarity’ agenda. Recent social and political philosophy (e.g. Honneth, Young, Taylor, Tully, Kymlicka, Habermas, Benhabib, Chandoke) provide a foundation for such a formulation in the concern to foster mutual recognition across the expanding social, ethnic and cultural differences that increasingly characterize and divide so many societies, often in destructive ways. Such an agenda would entail the intentional process of building a political culture of equal respect for groups who are stereotyped and denied value in our society. Thereby, the daily realization of their human rights would become a much deeper concern and commitment for governments, communities, and other citizens.
Third, a social inclusion as solidarity agenda could provide a useful lens for policy analysis that would bring to light ways in which institutional arrangements in our society exclude and devalue certain people and groups, even though their rights are assured. The agenda would not be about ensuring everyone’s access to every benefit and advantage Canadian institutions have to offer. Rather, it would ask that distinctions made in the rules and practices of institutions, services, and organizations not systematically undermine the recognition and status of any group based on their age, capacity, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Moreover, it would be about fostering foster forms of knowledge and recognition that value others, and about questioning forms of recognition that distance, that devalue, that cast aside. At an institutional level it would add to the rights protections associated with citizenship, a prescription to identify and transform policies and practices that violate human dignity through stereotyping and discrimination. At a personal level it would call for a ‘virtue’ of citizenship practiced through knowing and recognizing others in ways that bring human dignity.
In the final section of this paper, I show how a social inclusion analysis could be applied to the exclusions facing children with disabilities to generate a public agenda for change. It would bring to light a number of the rules and practices by which the devaluation of children with disabilities is constructed. Stereotyping of children; practices to ‘cleanse’ the human genome of genetic disability; and indicators for measuring and monitoring child development at a population level that equates disability with ill-health and abnormal development, I suggest are priorities for analysis. Such an analysis brings focus to the ways in which knowledge about children, and about certain groups of children is made. It asks about the status that different kinds of knowledge are given in gaining access to these different settings and institutions. Forms of knowledge that stereotype children as so different than other children that they are refused access to education, for instance, is challenged in such an agenda.
The analysis also raises a challenge to create new public spaces where the lives and realities of children and their families can be witnessed, where testimony can be given, where a new commitment to invest can take root. It is in these acts of recognition that the other, Kearney argues, comes to make an ethical difference, where new social bonds can be woven across the differences that divide. Surely this is the promise of a citizenship that values belonging, dignity, reciprocity and respect - where rights claims and aspirations obtain not only legal but broad social recognition and commitment. Only then are needed policy investments likely to follow. While the paper focuses on children with disabilities and their families, it also applies to other issues affecting children. Persisting and deepening child poverty in Canada, for example, is not a consequence of a lack of resources, or labour markets and policies that cannot be restructured. It is a lack of will and commitment, where the fact of poverty does not seem to matter enough. A social inclusion as solidarity agenda focuses on the process of bringing children and families who are poor back in, of including them among us, of making them matter in a way that will and commitment follow. A solidarity agenda does not on its own put bread on the table. It creates the public consciousness and commitment for public policies and practices to make sure it gets there.
In these times we find ourselves in, a commitment to social inclusion must include steps to bring understanding across the divides that establish race, language, gender, ability, creed, genotype, and nationality as grounds of status and value. To bring inclusion where it has so often been denied, we must forge a solidarity that listens across these divides of status and then questions their roots in law and in domestic and foreign policy. We must question the institutionalized refusal to know and respect others well. The evidence makes clear that a solidarity and political culture valuing all children is certainly not a given in our society; it is yet to be woven.
Michael Bach is Vice-President and Director of Research at The Roeher Institute – a national institute in Canada for research and development on public policy, disability and human rights. In January 2002, he will assume the position of Executive Vice-President, Canadian Association for Community Living.
Michael has undertaken research both nationally and internationally (Central and South America, the Caribbean, European Community, India) on a wide range of public policy issues – funding for disability-related supports, labour force inclusion, literacy and education, children’s and family issues, shifting to an individualized funding model for supports. His research has broadened beyond disability policy per se to ask broader questions about how to foster a more inclusive society for all people. Michael Bach is currently completing his PhD dissertation – a critique of the social and legal construction of incompetence in law.
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