Idiots

405 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.Four case studies were presented in an effort to document how mental retardation exists mostly in the eyes of the beholder. I served as a tutor for these school-aged children, and documented the interpretive activities among people who played major parts in their lives at the time of the study. Chief among the questions I ask is how mental retardation can be defined as having somewhat less than a mind, while patterns of relationships exist "as if" the mind were fully intact, potent, and abundantly human. A brief historiography of mental retardation's development as a science was presented, and its social, political, economic, and personal effects on the definers as well as the defined were explored. The conclusions pointed toward a kind of progress for people involved with mental retardation (those with it, and those without it) not marked as much by advancements in science and technology but by creating social space for people with mental retardation as fully fledged members of their human communities.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD