This time, last year, I was lucky enough to present two papers at the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities(IASSIDD) World Congress in Glasgow, Scotland! The World Congress is held every three years, it’s a huge collection of thousands of researchers from all over the globe. There was a packed schedule, and I gave two papers. I was honoured to win an Award to help fund my travel from the Ethics Special Interest Research Group for my paper on De-differentiation and Difference for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities.
The Congress went all week, and it was a beautiful time of year to be in Glasgow. I did lots of whirlwind tourism and ate a lot of scones. It was total luxury to have a week in Scotland all to myself with no kids in sight.
Both of my papers were on the Transition to Adulthood Project, the first was about de-differentiation and difference and socio-legal decision making, about the importance of real differences for people who have severe and profound intellectual disablities and how these are not dealt with very well by our legal and administrative systems. The second paper was about being an “outlier” in legal and administrative systems, and what the experiences people with PIMD and their supporters can tell us about assumptions about being an adult and a citizen. When we look at people who don’t fit in with the assumptions made by our social systems, it helps show us what those assumptions are, and how they might not work for everyone. The abstracts were published in the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research and you can find all of them here. I’ll post some slides from both papers in another post.
Glasgow was awesome, I met so many great researchers, and being a tourist in Scotland was just a bonus. And the scones were delicious!
Transition to Adulthood Project 