This talk challenges conventional critiques of institutions within disability studies and activism by drawing on fieldwork with a Catholic home and a Pentecostal school for people with intellectual disabilities in Uganda. Rather than stop at thinking about the institutional spaces of these Christian organizations as segregating exclusions from wider social life, this talk approaches the work these institutions do in terms of inclusion – as constitutive inclusions, referring to the ways these organizations serve to underwrite not only the basic existence but also the person-hood of their residents and students. In turn, such an analysis supports rethinking conventional North Atlantic understandings of institutions.
Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.