Why a Non-Disabling Society Requires Multiple Models of Intentional Community

Abstract:                    One overarching goal of disability studies scholarship, and disability rights activism, is a “non-disabling society.” Scholars and activists recognize that “disability” does not inhere primarily in individuals, but in the relationships between individuals of diverse abilities and the larger society. When society stigmatizes, pathologizes, isolates, or marginalizes people who move, think, feel, or sense the world in different ways, the result is a disabling society. By contrast, when each person is empowered to do meaningful work and build deep relationships in freedom, a non-disabling society can emerge. Because this is a somewhat utopian goal, it would seem that utopian and communal movements have much to contribute to the project of building a non-disabling society. What’s more, many therapeutic communities explicitly seek to create such a society. Yet there is a fraught relationship between the fields of communal and disabilities studies, in large part because of the long history of abusive and indeed dystopian “institutions” for persons with disabilities.

                                    In this presentation, I will suggest that the blending of elements from diverse communal traditions is one way that intentional communities can address and allay the reasonable reservations of disability studies scholars. No single communal paradigm has an adequate vision for a non-disabling society! To make this point concretely, I will first explore some key elements in the Camphill movement’s vision of a non-disabling society. These include the rejection of quantitative measures of intelligence, the refusal to treat human labor as a commodity to be bought and sold, and the insistence that all people thrive best when we are connected to the cyclical rhythms of nature. I will then argue that these are distinct, though not incompatible, with the aspects of a non-disabling society that are emphasized in disability studies scholarship, such as the principle of “nothing about us without us,” the use of creative technologies to ensure access, and the fierce critique of “institutions” that separate persons with disabilities from the larger society. Because egalitarian communities, ecovillages, and cohousing communities provide helpful paradigms for achieving these goals, Camphill and other therapeutic communities would do well to engage more fully with their insights.

Bio:                 Dan McKanan is Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, where he has taught since 2008. He has published widely on religion, radical social movements, and environmentalism. He is the author of six books, three of them specifically in the field of communal studies: Touching the World: Christian Communities Transforming Society; The Catholic Worker after Dorothy; and Camphill and the Future: Spirituality and Disability in an Evolving Communal Movement. Dan serves as co-chair of the International Communal Studies Association.