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Parental Advocacy and the Changing Attitudes Towards Down syndrome in Post-war Britain

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By Sophie George This article is based on a wider dissertation on ‘The Changing Attitudes Towards Down syndrome in Post War Britain’ written in 2019. It discusses the role of parental advocacy as a force for evolutionary change towards the inclusion of people with Down syndrome in post war Britain. I will therefore be focusing on the movements towards integrated education and the process of de-institutionalisation, as well as commenting on the introduction of the pre-natal test and its effects on the parental community.  At the start of the post war era, most children with Down syndrome were transferred to institutions and many were deemed ‘uneducable’. With the help of the parental movement, institutions were improved, community living was becoming a reality and education for people with intellectual disabilities like Down syndrome was more accessible and integrated. Whilst the parental movement helped change attitudes towards Down syndrome, it was not revolutionary and represents a
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Eating Dirt, Treating Slaves

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By  Rana Hogarth Historians of slavery must often contend with how the power imbalances of the slave system continue to shape the archival record, and, more importantly, influence the types of stories that get told. I certainly found this to be the case when writing my first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press 2017). I felt overwhelmed as I weighed the written correspondence, published medical treatises, military records, and plantation records, medical lectures etc. by white physicians, military officers, colonial elites, and slave owners, against the dearth of written sources left behind by enslaved and free black people. Thus, it was a great challenge to construct a narrative using sources whose faithfulness in accounting for black people’s experiences in sickness and health were tenuous to say the least. Given the realities of the archives related to slavery, my approach to research became
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‘What is their Crime?’ Disability, Race and Eugenics in Britain’s Brexit Debate

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By Emmeline Burdett Disability and the Brexit Debate One of the features of the debate about Brexit (Britain’s departure from the European Union) has been that Remainers (who should probably now be called Rejoiners) portray people who voted in favour of Brexit as being complicit in the resurgence of aggressive nationalism of which Brexit, along with such things as the presidencies of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States, is widely seen as forming a part. Rejoiners rightly show this resurgent nationalism as being dangerous not only in itself, but also because it represents an alarming return to the attitudes which facilitated the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century.  The subject of this blog post will be the way in which many Rejoiners assume that being historically-aware requires one to be extremely sensitive to issues of race, but very little else. One of the results of this is that disablist insults (insults which either imply that one’s opponent’s
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