Nidhi Singal, Paul Lynch, Shruti Taneja Johansson, eds. Education and Disability in the Global South: New Perspectives from Africa and Asia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Illustrations. xv + 322 pp. $130.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4742-9120-0. 

Reviewed by M. Lynn Rose (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani) Published on H-Disability (July, 2021) Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56514

This excellent edited collection consists of a foreword and introduction, followed by two parts, with sixteen chapters altogether. Each chapter has, in addition to a list of references, a helpful summary of key points and suggested questions for discussion. The book is well indexed.

Alfredo J. Artiles, the author of the foreword, praises the collection for filling a gap in the literature on disability and education and calling for “situated analyses of inclusion implementation in the neglected contexts of Southern regions” (p. xv). The first chapter, “Education of Children with Disabilities: Changing Landscapes of New Opportunities and Challenges,” coauthored by the three editors, serves as an introduction to the collection.

Part 1, “Framing the Debates,” consists of chapters 2, 3, and 4. Chapter 2, by Pauline Rose, looks at including children with disabilities in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal for education. Rose reports that new concerns focus more on the quality of education than on whether or not children with disabilities are attending school at all. Nidhi Singal, in chapter 3, “Researching Disability and Education: Rigour, Respect and Responsibility,” stresses that a fourth “R,” research, underlies an effective combination of disability and education in the Global South. This urgent need, she cautions, must be driven by “an in-depth appreciation of the realities and concerns of Southern contexts” (p. 53). The coauthors of chapter 4, Islay Mactaggart and Hannah Kuper, continue to stress the value of research, especially quantitative research. They include eight boxes with helpful resources such as box 4.6, which contains links to disability survey question examples.

Part 2, “Situated Perspectives,” has three subsections. The first, “Applying Conceptual Approaches,” opens with chapter 5, Matthew J. Schuleka’s “Advancing a Comparative Case Study Approach towards Education and Disability Research: An Example from Bhutan.” Schuleka points out that neither a universalist model nor a micro-level approach to research in disability and education is the most useful; rather, he advocates for comparative case studies as particularly relevant in the Global South. Next, “Diversifying Theoretical Commitments for a Transnational Inclusive Education: Lessons from India” (chapter 6) by Srikala Narayan brings to bear what she calls the Third World feminist lens, which “suggests that the preparation for inclusive education requires supporting teachers’ movement through, within and between different ideological systems to generate many, unpredictable and creative forms of resistance” (p. 122). The last chapter of “Applying Conceptual Approaches” is chapter 7, Colleen Howell’s “Participation of Students with Disabilities in South African Higher Education: Contesting the Uncontested.” South Africa’s post-apartheid program in higher education has always included the goal of equity for students with disabilities; still, a great deal of inequity remains. Howell argues that the capacity of South African universities must be built and that this must include training at the levels of teaching and learning.

The second part of “Situated Perspectives” is “Schooling and Teachers.” Chapter 8, “Reframing ‘Spaces’ for Educating Children with Autism: Perspectives from Urban India,” by Shruti Taneja Johansson, opens this subsection. Johansson encourages the consideration of local contexts and of the use of space, both physical and educational, as metaphor. “The educational space for children with autism,” she writes, “was not restricted to the school but extended to the parents as well” (p. 157). The ninth chapter is Richard Rose and Jayashree Rajanahally’s “The Application of Inclusive Principles and Practice in Schools in South India: Successes and Challenges.” The authors stress the importance of considering the local context, as well as the importance of teachers, principals, and tutors coordinating their efforts. They also point out the neglected area of professional development after the courses have been completed, when students often need support in application. The tenth chapter, “The Practice Architectures of Inclusive Education in Two African Contexts,” is authored by Anabanithi Muthukrishna, who explains “practice architectures.” Muthukrishna draws on Stephen Kemmis and Peter Grootenboer’s theory, which posits that practice architectures are composed of three spaces: semantic, physical, and social; each gives meaning to and allows examination of teaching.[1] The local context is key to gaining a deeper understanding of inclusive education in the Global South. Maria Kett, Marcella Deluca, and Mark T. Carew coauthored chapter 11, “How Prepared Are Teachers to Deliver Inclusive Education: Evidence from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone.” This chapter summarizes a study of the efficacy of teachers in the three countries through six themes. Overall, while the teachers are willing to embrace inclusive education, training and resources are necessary.

“Situated Perspectives: Child, Family, and Community,” which consists of five chapters, is the third and final component of part 2. Chapter 12, by Paul Lynch and Melissa Gladstone, is “Exploring Ways to Support the Infrastructure for early Childhood Development: A Study of Children with Visual Impairment in Malawi.” The authors focus on the importance of involving family and the community in education and of paying attention to the wider community systems in which the child learns. Figure 12.1, on page 231, is a helpful diagram showing the concentric circles of systems, from the microsystem to the macrosystem. Garett Dart, Yonah Matemba, and Jack Gunnell are the coauthors of the thirteenth chapter, “Inclusive Education for Learners with Albinism: Malawi, Zambia, and Botswana.” While the cultural meaning of albinism results in threats to the safety of students with albinism, policy, strategies, and intervention can lead to educational inclusion and mainstreaming. Contextual appropriateness is supremely important. “Listening to Children with Disabilities: Voices from Uganda and Malawi,” the fourteenth chapter, is authored by Mary Wickenden. The voices of children, especially children with disabilities, have been excluded but are now being sought, as they should be, Wickenden says, for effective research and policymaking. She cautions that although the voices of children are now being used, “noticeably absent from the consultations are children with the most stigmatized impairments: communication, severe cognitive, behavioural and multiple difficulties” (p. 284). The fifteenth chapter, by Tehminna Hammad, is “Mothers as Educational Enablers: Examining the Journeys of Young Women with Disabilities in Pakistan.” Hammad explores the potential effect of mothers on the educational path of their daughters. The context of patriarchy, whether strong or weak, is especially important to consider.

The final chapter is a brief conclusion, authored by the book’s three editors. The conclusion focuses on two issues, the first of which is “today’s challenges.” The authors point out disability as a “significant constant factor” within rapidly changing global patterns of rural-urban migration along with conflict and environmental disasters (p. 310). Against this scenario, disability remains neglected in research. The second issue is “negotiating a balance in power between Northern and Southern institutions” (p. 311). Here, the authors acknowledge the imbalance of access to information, data, and communication—usually taken for granted by northern institutions—between the Global North and South and call for ongoing communication and debate, both between the North and South and also among southern entities.

The overall message of the essays is the importance of including community and context in comparative research investigations. In this way, the essays echo and amplify the important themes of Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic’s edited compilation Disability in the Global South and are a useful companion to that collection. The summary of key points and discussion questions that follow each chapter make the book a great choice for the undergraduate classroom. Overall, this collection is an important contribution to disability studies in the Global South and to the literature on inclusive education.

Note

[1]. Stephen Kemmis and Peter Grootenboer, “Situating Practice in Praxis: Practice Architectures and the Cultural, Social, and Material Conditions for Practice,” in Enabling Praxis: Challenges for Education, ed. Stephen Kemmis and Tracey J. Smith (Rotterdam: Sense, 2008): 37-62.

Citation: M. Lynn Rose. Review of Singal, Nidhi; Lynch, Paul; Johansson, Shruti Taneja, eds., Education and Disability in the Global South: New Perspectives from Africa and Asia. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. July, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56514 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson. Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880-1948. Disability History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Illustrations. 320 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5261-2431-9. 

Reviewed by Vicky Long (Newcastle University) Published on H-Disability (July, 2021) Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55959

The foundational texts of disability studies often present industrialization as an unmitigated disaster for disabled people, establishing a society that marginalized and excluded people with impairments from the workforce. This monograph evolved from a Wellcome-funded project led by Professor David Turner and the late Professor Anne Borsay, which drew on historical research from three British coalfields (northeast England, central Scotland, and south Wales) to closely scrutinize the relationship between disability and industrialization. I note here my participation in the project’s research team though not in the authorship of this book. Like its preceding companion volume (David Turner and Daniel Blackie’s Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780–1880 [2018]), it offers a fine-grained analysis of how understandings and experiences of disability were affected by industrial development. Taking us up to the nationalization of the coal industry and postwar settlement, which introduced a no-fault compensation system for disabled workers, this book interrogates the impact of industrial expansion and contraction on disabled workers, the mechanization of work, and the introduction of an adversarial system to compensate workers impaired through disease or injury from undertaking their work. Entwining historical research with insights from literature, the authors concur with earlier writers that industry, specifically the coal industry, played a pivotal role in shaping the history of disability in modern Britain. However, they present a nuanced argument about the nature of this relationship, bringing to the fore the significance of time and place.

The coal industry provides the case study for this research, because, as the authors explain, no other industry “generated as large a number of disabled individuals on a daily basis” (p. 249). Impact and crush injuries arose through haulage and falls of rock and coal, while the constant pressure and impact of working positions led to “beat” hand, knee, and elbow, impairments arising from painful localized inflammation and infection. The dust generated through mining, meanwhile, caused the chronic lung disease pneumoconiosis, while poor underground lighting was thought to be a leading cause of miners’ nystagmus, an involuntary oscillation of the eyeballs. The relative level of risk miners faced fluctuated over the period covered by this book, partly in response to wage systems and working hours and partly following mechanization and electrification of the industry, which generated more dust and accidents, respectively. Risks also varied by region: the heaviest burden of pneumoconiosis, for example, fell in south Wales. When the coal industry flourished, impaired workers could often secure light work at the surface. However, impaired workers found fewer opportunities when the industry contracted in the interwar years, while many employers purged impaired workers from their workforce following the introduction of workmen’s compensation in 1897, viewing them as a liability. The scheduling of nystagmus and pneumoconiosis as diseases meriting workmen’s compensation was partially a victory for miners’ unions but also generated formal and informal bars to work in the coal industry for miners affected by these conditions. These men were deemed “human derelicts” and “the living dead,” not because they were disabled but because they were unable to secure employment in a mono-industrial community and were sometimes only awarded partial compensation (pp. 49, 52). Nor was disability confined to miners: the authors show how a combination of poor housing, heavy domestic labor, and reproductive injuries generated impairments among women in coalfields communities.

A chapter on medical care and rehabilitation suggests that coalfields disability was medicalized but also reveals that this was largely at the behest of miners and their unions. General practitioners were miners’ first port of call, but high caseloads led in many cases to perfunctory, conveyer-belt style care. Medical aid societies, friendly societies, and works clubs supplemented this care, funded by contributions from employees, and, in some instances, employers too. Miners in south Wales had good access to hospitals in coalfields areas, while miners in the northeast of England and central Scotland were more reliant on city hospitals. Yet medical treatment for much of this period was largely ineffective. The only treatment for nystagmus was to remove the sufferer from his work, while care for pneumoconiosis sufferers was palliative, not curative. Doctors, meanwhile, primarily assessed patients to determine their eligibility for compensation. Amputation was often the end result of complex fractures and crush injuries, due to the limited skills of surgeons and orthopedists, although good prosthetic limbs and assistive devices might enable a miner to keep working. By the interwar period, convalescent homes, supported by friendly societies, unions, employers, and the miners’ welfare fund, became increasingly medicalized with a growing emphasis on rehabilitation, fracture clinics, physiotherapy, and orthopedics.

Financial assistance was also crucial to miners unable to secure full wages following accident or illness. The authors sketch out the patchwork of financial support: community collections, charities, friendly societies, workmen’s compensation, permanent relief funds, and the poor law. Yet despite the breadth of provision, many impaired miners were compelled to rely on multiple forms of welfare to make ends meet, and provisions varied by region and period. Permanent relief funds, for example, which were co-funded by employers and workers, provided disablement benefits. In the 1890s, around 90 percent of workers in the northeast of England were members, whereas only 5-10 percent of miners in south Wales were members by the Edwardian period. This partly reflected a more consensual approach to industrial relations in the northeast but also the introduction of workmen’s compensation. The operation of this adversarial system was still influenced by regional politics, however: in the northeast, a joint arbitration committee sought to reach decisions on contested workmen’s compensation cases, while more cases were contested in south Wales and Scotland. Securing and retaining compensation was frequently demeaning and was fraught with uncertainty. Miners struggled to claim if their impairments could not be unequivocally ascribed to a workplace accident or scheduled disease, while employers could stop payments and require disabled miners and their unions to take their case back before the medical referee and, if necessary, arbitration committee and county court, a practice condemned by miners’ unions for conveying the impression “that the injured person is a thief and getting money by false pretences, or that our people took a pride in getting mutilated” (p. 190).

The introduction of workmen’s compensation was pivotal in the politicization of disability in this era, the authors contend. Non-union members were disadvantaged in this process; without recourse to the union’s negotiating skills or legal representation, they had to rely on the goodwill of colliery officials. Yet union members were also at a disadvantage relative to union staff, with little recourse if they were unhappy with the assistance provided. Unions sought to influence the political process by supporting the election of miners’ members of Parliament and procured technical expertise to aid lobbying for compensation.

Two further chapters provide fresh perspectives on understandings and experiences of disability in coalfields communities through a spatial and literary analysis. Focusing on space brings to the fore the centrality of miners’ homes, a liminal public/private space, in which impaired and convalescent miners were often moved downstairs into the more public area of the home where they could interact more with family and visitors or sit outside on the front step or pavement, when weather permitted. Public spaces, such as parks and war memorials, became focal points for disabled miners to gather, yet public buildings were often not designed to be accessible. Representations of disability in coalfields literature, meanwhile, which are used throughout the book as a source, are interrogated more closely in the final chapter, revealing their pivotal role within this genre. The authors reveal how the moral and religious meanings ascribed to disability lost ground in twentieth-century coalfields literature; instead, disability revealed both the harm caused by exploitative capitalism and the mutualism and interdependency of coalfields communities. This body of fiction normalized disability and premature aging as intrinsic aspects of the life course in coalfields communities.

Fiction, in this respect, mirrored life: disability, conclude the authors, was indeed ubiquitous and normalized in coalfields communities, even though people with impairments were marginalized and isolated to some degree. Mining caused significant levels of impairment, but the coal industry also at times absorbed many workers with impairments into its workforce, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. Miners’ unions, meanwhile, devoted considerable time and resources to tackling the impairment and disability arising from the coal industry, so much so that this became a core component of their work, underpinning the campaign for nationalization. Further historical research could determine the relationship between disability and other industries, both in Britain and beyond. What this book does, however, is reveal the contribution history can make to disability studies. History is not there to generalize but to offer nuance and complicate our understandings and to emphasize the importance of context, place, and time. The authors tell not one story but many stories, highlighting distinct regional and national trajectories informed by the divergent pace of industrialization across the United Kingdom, variations in geology and geography, and distinctive religious, political, and industrial cultures. They succeed in bringing to visibility fragments of individual stories that remind us of both the difficulties and rewards of retrieving the voices of disabled people.

Citation: Vicky Long. Review of Bohata, Kirsti; Jones, Alexandra; Mantin, Mike; Thompson, Steven, Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880-1948. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. July, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55959 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Jessie Hewitt. Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 252 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5017-5331-2.

Reviewed by Morag Allan Campbell (University of St Andrews) Published on H-Disability (June, 2021) Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56116

In Institutionalizing Gender, Jessie Hewitt, assistant professor of history at the University of Redlands, California, uses contemporary publications, and periodicals and archive material from Parisian hospitals, to explore gender and power relations in nineteenth-century French psychiatry, and to uncover the ways in which doctors not only defined rationality and cure in terms of expected gender values, but also played a part in cultivating those gendered expectations. Although the six main chapters follow a chronological path through the French asylum system in the nineteenth century, the author’s aim is not to offer a history of French psychiatry during this period. Rather, Hewitt’s study takes us on a journey through “particular moments and clinical contexts” that especially reflect the gendered nature of psychiatric doctrines at this time, and also key points where she identifies significant shifts in ideas and practices (p. 14). Broadly, the first three chapters explore these gendered elements of psychiatric theories and the gender-based principles underpinning moral treatment. The second half of the book explores the demise of moral treatment and psychiatry’s move away from belief in what Hewitt describes as “the healing power of bourgeois gender and family values” (p. 17).

Chapter 1 takes as its focus the ideas of the celebrated “founding ‘fathers’” of French psychiatry and looks at how assumptions about gender roles were intrinsic to definitions of sanity and insanity and underpinned treatment and care (p. 19). During this early period, treatment was carried out with the expectation of cure and the reintegration of the patient into society—once the patient had resumed the display of appropriate gendered (and bourgeois) attributes and behaviors.

In 1838, legislation increased the power of doctors and established a French national system of institutional care of the insane. Many people, however, remained suspicious of the emerging psychiatric profession and its practices. Chapter 2 explores the controversy surrounding the “cold shower” treatment, also known as the “bath of surprise” (p. 46). This controversy, Hewitt claims, illustrates the clash between the medical professional and “shifting standards of bourgeois masculinity” (p. 48). Furthermore, the debate reveals how mid-nineteenth-century French alienists became aware of the need to appear honorable and to establish a respectable professional identity.

Much has been written about the female patient in asylum histories, but, in chapter 3, Hewitt turns our attention to some examples of women acting as practitioners rather than patients. Although women were not permitted to gain a formal medical education and qualifications and were therefore barred from taking up positions in French public institutions, many women actively worked alongside their husbands in private establishments and maisons de santé. There were even some female directors, or directrices, running their own private asylums. Hewitt introduces us to Marie Rivet, or Brierre de Boismont, who was brought up “amidst the mad” in her parents’ private asylum (p. 78). Madame Rivet went on to direct asylums of her own and to publish on the subject of insanity. Hewitt explores how Rivet, and others in her position, effectively engaged in “marketing the ‘angel in the house’” image, capitalizing on their traditional role as nurturers in the vie de famille set-up (p. 73).

Hewitt begins identification of the decline of moral treatment in French institutions in chapter 4, pointing to a number of scandals and press campaigns directed against the profession of psychiatry from the 1850s onward. Many of these campaigns focused on instances of sane people being committed to lunatic asylums as accusations of the abuse of medical authority in state institutions became a vehicle for dissent under the regime of Louis-Napoleon and later in the nineteenth century. Such campaigns caused alienists to begin to question the value of the asylum as places of care. Hewitt also highlights how contested asylum commitment cases reveal complex family dynamics and, in particular, a shift toward rationality as the seat of authority and changes in the nature of patriarchal power.

In chapter 5, Hewitt traces the profession through dramatic events of 1870 and 1871, arguing that psychiatric practitioners not only struggled on through the months of siege and civil war but were able to some extent to turn the situation to their advantage, using it to legitimize their authority and affirm an essential position in the new republic. The changed political order, however, presented a new environment, one in which ideas about the hereditary nature of mental illness were taking hold, undermining faith in “gender-based treatment” (p. 140).

By the end of the nineteenth century, doctors and the public alike had lost faith in the principles of moral treatment as physical explanations for mental illness became dominant, and efforts to clear the asylums of their seemingly incurable populations were instigated. The final chapter explores proposed alternatives to the asylum system, including schemes such as “family colonies” wherein patients were placed with a host family for treatment, and the opening up of asylums to allow free movement of patients while still under psychiatric care (p. 157).

While moral treatment and gender-based ideas about insanity were certainly not exclusive to France, Hewitt argues that the period of shifting power dynamics following the French Revolution created a unique environment for introducing innovation in medical treatment and practices on a wide scale. Her observations offer an intriguing insight into French psychiatry and institutions during the nineteenth century and, as she claims, reveal much about the construction of gender within the family in France at this time, a period when adherence to bourgeois gender values and an appearance of rationality had a key role in establishing respectability and authority.

Throughout the book, Hewitt argues that there were inherent contradictions in the beliefs central to moral treatment. While bourgeois family values could be the cure for mental illness, the family itself and the expectation for those within it to adhere to these values could often be the cause. Women who rejected the role of “angel in the house,” for example by wanting to find careers outside of the home, or not wishing to have children, could find themselves classed as mad; yet women were also seen as susceptible to madness on account of the very behaviors expected of them, such as pregnancy and childbirth.

While Hewitt regards women as being more oppressed than men by the asylum system, as they generally did not have the authority or means to contest their diagnoses, she also stresses that men could also be vulnerable if they did not live up to cultural expectations—the rational man was heterosexual, married (preferably with children), and was involved in a financially secure, professional career. However, the pressures of maintaining such a life could themselves cause men to crack. The performance of appropriate familial roles was therefore not only the cure, but also one of the “key sources” of mental illness (p. 41).

Patients and doctors were involved in the two-way process of the “mutual performance of the moral treatment,” which drew on shared understandings of gendered roles (p. 35). Notions of masculinity and femininity were open to change, and this performance locked medical men in the grip of gendered expectations as much as the patients.

Hewitt’s study of Marie Rivet, and other directrices, offers another contradiction. While rationality and self-control were associated with masculinity and women were regarded as inherently irrational, the example of the directrices shows that, when placed among irrational men, women were able to secure a distinctive place of authority. Such women were able to secure and exert power in ways that exploited the very norms which restricted others.

Institutionalizing Gender invites the reader to rethink ideas about gender within the asylum setting, while revealing as much about the nature of the family in France during this period as it does about French psychiatry. It offers a perspective that goes beyond the study of the relationship between female patients and their psychiatrists—indeed, Hewitt has consciously moved away from this and allocates more space in the book to men and male doctors. However, the study of Marie Rivet and the directrices who subverted the very ideas of masculine rationality to take authority themselves offers a refreshing take on the history of women in the asylum setting.

Institutionalizing Gender is highly readable. It is also widely accessible as it is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, making the e-book editions of this book available as open-access volumes.

Citation: Morag Allan Campbell. Review of Hewitt, Jessie, Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. June, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56116 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.