SCHOLARS AWARD: Belief and Communication in the Social Worlds of Adolescents with Severe and Profound Intellectual Disabilities

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Communication is always a leap of faith. But this is particularly the case for people who work with adolescents with severe and profound intellectual disabilities. Their interactions with others challenge our understanding of what a social relationship is and could be. For typically developing children, language begins with what researchers call the "basic affiliative need" -- the emotional need for connection -- that compels infants to imitate others and interpret their intentions in increasingly effective ways. This observation raises intriguing questions when it comes to interactions involving individuals who neither imitate nor use conventional signs. What are the effects of the "basic affiliative need" felt by the family members, aids, therapists, and teachers who live and work in close proximity with adolescents with severe and profound intellectual disabilities? How do cultural norms and institutional constraints influence how they treat adolescents in their midst? How do they learn to connect with their loved ones, clients, and students across what might appear to be an unbridgeable gulf? What new social worlds emerge as a result? This Cultural Anthropology Scholars award supports research-specific training to prepare cultural anthropologist Dr. Danilyn Rutherford to address these questions. With guidance from colleagues in the University of California Santa Cruz Department of Psychology, Rutherford will master methods suited to the collection of data on the interactions that occur between disabled adolescents and those who work with them. She will also undertake coursework in speech and language pathology and special education at San Jose State University to learn the methods and techniques used with individuals with complex communicative needs. This is not usual training for cultural anthropologists but it will allow Rutherford to to carry apply anthropology's traditional methods of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation to entirely new domains: speech therapy sessions with disabled adolescents and informal interactions at school and at home. The training undertaken through this grant will provide a model for interdisciplinary collaboration. Rutherford's work will enhance anthropology by demonstrating what anthropologists can can learn from fields that make general claims about human development. At the same time, her work will demonstrate how the intensive methods of cultural anthropology enlarge understanding of human development and inter-personal communication. Findings from the research enabled by this training also will benefit members of the special needs population by helping policy makers and practitioners tailor services more closely to students' abilities and needs; and it will showcase the creativity of members of a long stigmatized population and of those who work with them.