Oxford Brookes Centre For Health, Medicine And Society Podcasts

This seminar on ‘From Deficiency to Difficulty’ captures an historical journey made by people with learning difficulties from the objects to potential subjects of the construction of their social identities. The seminar discusses three historical phases of these constructions, from a formalisation of a condition called ‘mental deficiency’ following the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act; to the period of the entrenchment of their segregation in the inter-war years; and finally to the slow growth of self-determination following World War Two. The seminar focuses on relationships with employment experienced by people with learning difficulties as a way of navigating through the extended historical period. Employment has been considered as irrelevant to the lives of people with learning difficulties by what Dan Goodley has called the ‘naturalised views’ or the ‘common sense’ of learning difficulty identities. The seminar shows that far from being irrelevant, their