Research Catalog

Making life work freedom and disability in a community group home

Title: Making life work [electronic resource] : freedom and disability in a community group home / Jack Levinson.
Author: Levinson, Jack, 1965-
Publication: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2010.

Available Online

Details

Description

1 online resource (xxii, 285 p.) : ill.

Summary

""Making Life Work is a wonderful book jack Levinson ̀presents' insightful, thought provoking, and, well-written ethnographic portrayals of ̀dependent' adults and their and their caregivers,"---WENDY SIMONDS, Georgia State University" "Group homes emerged in the United States in the 1970s as a solution to the failure of the large institutions that, for more than a century, segregated and abused people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Yet community services have not, for the most part, delivered on the promises of rights, self-determination, and integration made more than thirty years ago, and critics predominantly portray group homes simply as settings of social control." "Making Life Work is a clear-eyed ethnography of a New York City group home based on more than a year of field research. Jack Levinson reveals that rather than being seen as the antithesis of freedom, the group home must be understood as representing the fundamental dilemmas between authority and the individual in contemporary liberal societies. No longer inmates but citizens, these people who are presumed---rightly or wrongl---to lack the capacity for freedom actually govern themselves. Levinson, a former group home counselor, demonstrates that the group home depends on the very capacities for independence and individuality it cultivates in its residents. At the same time, he addresses the complex relationship between services and social control in the history of intellectual and developmental disabilities, interrogating broader social service policies and the role of clinical practice in the community."--BOOK JACKET.

Uniform Title

Making life work (Online)

Alternative Title

Making life work (Online)

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-270) and index.

Access (note)

Access restricted to authorized users.

Contents

Locating the problem -- Intellectual disability: a brief history -- Governing disability in the community -- The work of everyday life -- How the group home works -- All in a day's work -- Endless, uncertain work -- The clinical problem of everyday life -- Group home technologies -- Expertise and the work of staff meetings -- Paper technologies: doing and documenting -- Goal plans and individual conduct -- At risk -- What everybody knows about Paul -- Conclusion: making life work.

LCCN