Sites and Shapes of Transinstitutionalization

Abstract

The study of transinstitutionalization necessarily varies by context. In this issue we guard against misconceptions that institutionalization is an action that took place in the past, whose loose ends we are now trying to tie together and where contemporary institutionalizing conditions are merely legacies that will, in time, fade away. To think of institutionalization as something of the past is to gently scratch its surface. And, given the wide breadth of transinstitutionalization and the many lives and stories it encompasses, we are aware of the limitations of covering this vast topic in one special issue. Yet, following a call to include disability in developing new approaches to understanding modernity (Van Trigt, 2019), our aim with this collection is to gather the latest research and reflections on transinstitutionalization as a topic that can take flight in our theoretical and cultural imaginations, a topic that can help us transcend the dangers of “theoretical complacency” that come with imagining the ongoing as a past, one-time thing (Bauman, 2000, p. 3).

Youth carceral deinstitutionalisation and transinstitutionalisation in Ontario: Recent developments and questions

“…Chiefly, concerns were raised early on that deinstitutionalisation did not, in fact, lead to greater availability of community‐based care and support, but instead led to the imposition and replication of carceral institutional logics onto other public, community and social networks. Rather than transforming institutionalised care, then, many suggest that the institution was simply dispersed and decentralised into the community (Church, Vostermans & Underwood, 2020; Haley & Jones, 2020).…”

“…According to Haley & Jones (2020) transinstitutionalisation might be thought of as four often overlapping processes. The first meaning refers to the transfer of mad and disabled people from large‐scale psychiatric institutions into other institutionalised settings such as prisons, hospitals and rooming houses.…”

“…With the closure of some facilities such as those for people with disability, others have taken their place, such as prisons, hospitals and community organisations. This is described as transinstitutionalisation, and speaks to the ways an institution persists in different forms and sites (Church, Vostermans & Underwood, 2020; Haley & Jones, 2020). Regarding Ontario, there is some dated literature speaking to the long history of justice reform, including closures and transitions of youth confining institutions – from Reformatories, to Industrial Schools, to Training Schools, to Youth Detention Centers, and the rise of community‐run programmes and treatment centres in the 1970s and 1980s (Bennett, 1988; Boyd, 1981; Grant, 1984; Morrison, 1984; Neff, 1994).…”

Activism, Resistance and Presence: Exploring Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies in Canada (Editors' Introduction)

“…Understanding madness as a reclaimed mode of being that intersects with childhood (Douglas et al, 2021), and with recognition that mental health discourses circulating through childhood are often a culmination of ableism, colonialism, and psy-discipline dominance (Mills & LeFrancois, 2018), we feel an urgency to circulate Landry's first-of-its-kind list. Pioneering work in this area by Brenda LeFrançois (2007LeFrançois ( , 2008LeFrançois ( , 2012 teaches us that children experience madness, and this experience involves agency and resistance, especially in trans/institutional contexts (LeBlanc Haley & Jones, 2020). Yet, as Landry points out, madness is too often hidden from children by adults.…”

Slow Story-Making in Urgent Times

“…In the current COVID context, naturalizing disabled and aged people’s vulnerability to premature death becomes a way of masking oppressive histories and intensifying inequities that cast our forms of interdependency (acknowledging that all of us are dependent on others albeit in different ways) as signifying our less-than-human status. By erasing how triaging policies combined with austerity politics, warehousing practices, and other transinstitutional modes of governance exacerbate disabled people’s vulnerabilities, naturalization also weaponizes vulnerability to both produce and rationalize the disproportionately higher rates of COVID-19 and untimely death evident in our communities (Changfoot et al, under review; LeBlanc Haley & Jones, 2020; Rice et al, 2021). These discursive-material practices accomplish the “vulnerabilization” of targeted groups by redirecting responsibility for our well-being away from the collective and back to the individual, thus resituating vulnerability within unwanted bodies rather than in the intersections of those bodies with our sociomaterial worlds.…”