Description | Brown bag talk sponsored by the Disability Studies Program. Abstract: Persons with disabilities are overrepresented within the prison population. With the growing number of inmates with disabilities prisons are increasingly instituting inmate caregiving programs. Through these programs, inmates without disabilities are employed as personal assistants for inmates with disabilities, supporting them in daily activities. Disability studies has traditionally condemned the provision of care as a form of oppression and sought to take the “care out of care work” by reconceptualizing it as personal assistance. Feminist scholars, however, have historically focused on care through the prism of gender, uncovering the exploitation of caregivers, and seeking to recapture the concept by theorizing its emancipatory potential in the face of the dominant, masculine, market-based value system. Prisons are hypermasculine spaces often devoid of care, where positive, mutual relationships of concern (or care) are scarce and inmates are subjected to abuse and social isolation. We discuss the meaning and the potential of caregiving programs to become a form of even greater subjugation and oppression of both inmates receiving and giving care and, alternatively, its transformative potential in the lives of individual inmates and the larger prison environment as posing an alternative relationship to the hypermasculine imperative. Bio: Stephen Meyers is an Assistant Professor at the Jackson School of International Studies and in the Law, Societies, and Justice Program. His areas of research interest are Human Rights, Disability, and Global Civil Society. In particular, he focuses on grassroots associations of persons with disabilities working at the local level in Nicaragua and their interactions with international organizations promoting the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was passed in 2006. |
---|