Teodor Mladenov
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Independent Living and other critical positions
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Chapter 7 expands the critical-theoretical scope of the book. It begins with a critique of capacity that targets liberal-individualist and cognitivist versions of autonomy. Independent Living’s contribution to this critique is in highlighting the socially constructed nature of mental capacity – a position underpinning ENIL’s advocacy for supported decision making as an alternative to substitute decision making (guardianship) in policies concerning people with intellectual impairments. The chapter then focuses on critique of coloniality, and particularly on the perception of Independent Living as ‘colonial’ due to its North American origins and its convergence with neoliberalism. In response, it is argued that the structural-collectivist understanding of Independent Living embraced throughout the book and grounded in the work of ENIL opens up a space for reconciliation between decolonial disability studies and Independent Living. Similar issues are then explored from the opposite angle – by considering critique of decoloniality, and particularly criticisms of the Global North versus Global South binary. The author’s postsocialist experience in the Centre for Independent Living–Sofia is provided as evidence of indigenising Independent Living beyond the North versus South divide. The chapter finishes with a critique of technology. Having access to assistive devices is a pillar of Independent Living, but both assistive and mainstream technology can be (and often are) ableist and exploitative. To grasp this ambivalence, the chapter makes recourse to the concept of pharmakon (drawing on Bernard Stiegler) and the work of the ‘new materialists’ in social sciences. The discussion ends with a call for democratisation and decolonialisation of the design of enabling ‘things’.

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