This thesis is an ethnography of Rights-Centered Public Job Project for People with Severe Disability (hereinafter referred to as RPJ). It explores how people with profound disabilities are enacted as persons and co-workers. People with profound dis...
This thesis is an ethnography of Rights-Centered Public Job Project for People with Severe Disability (hereinafter referred to as RPJ). It explores how people with profound disabilities are enacted as persons and co-workers. People with profound disabilities is a category designed to identify disabled people who RPJ wants to employ and refers to people who are very severely disabled who cannot lead their daily lives and have little opportunity for economic activities. This study specifically concerns the cultural and artistic labor of people with profound developmental disabilities who have limited linguistic communication.
The RPJ began with the proposal of the Nationwide Solidarity for the Elimination of Discrimination against the Disabled (hereinafter referred to as NSD) and the budget support of the Seoul Municipal Government in 2020 and employs the profoundly disabled. There have been some attempts to introduce and promote RPJ through press conferences and debates and to theorize disabled people’s labor through RPJ as legitimate labor, but there is no full-fledged study on the concrete content and meaning of jobs. This research attempts to addressing this gap in the research. The researcher observed 12 people with profound developmental disabilities interacting with activists at Nodeul Night School for Disabled People (hereinafter referred to as Nodeul Night School), one of the RPJ’s practice agencies, and did in-depth interviews with 12 people including disabled people’s mothers, activists, art instructors, and people with profound physical disabilities. I analyze how RPJ is established, the personhood of the people with profound developmental disabilities enacted in social relationships, and the effects of naming their activities as labor.
RPJ has been implemented since 2020 as NSD required to the Seoul Municipal Government in relation with labor and deinstitutionalization issues, which have been historically important and contemporarily emerging agendas in the disability movement in Korea. Chapter 2 analyzes the process of establishing RPJ despite the different stances of the Seoul Municipal Government and the NSD. I pay particular attention to the role that the concept of ‘right’ play in this process. RPJ was established as they accepted the term ‘rights’ in ways that could translate each group’s different interests.
Activists at Nodeul Night School, which occupies an important position in the history of the disability movement in Korea, value disabled people’s self-determination and labor as rights that cannot be encroached upon. Chapter 3 examines how the ‘rights’ of people with profound developmental disabilities who have difficulty communicating becomes possible at Nodeul Night School and how their personhood is found in the process. The rights of individuals with profound developmental disabilities, who have difficulty expressing consent or rejection in a usual way, are enacted through relational practices as Nodeul Night School activists empathize with them and carefully examine the surrounding situation and the person's mood. In this process, People with profound developmental disabilities are enacted as a person through social relations within Nodeul Night School. People with profound developmental disabilities get used to the interest and support of activists who care about non-linguistic expression and reveal their personhood in an orderly social coordination or in a way that fails coordination.
Dancing or singing through social relationships with activists is a daily activity within Nodeul Night School for people with profound developmental disabilities. Chapter 4 focuses on the new dynamics of relationships and emerging capabilities made possible by naming these activities as labor. The motive of RPJ makes activists expect people with profound developmental disabilities to behave suitably for labor, including things like consistent attendance, and creates a tendency to externalize their activity to public spaces outside of Nodeul Night School. At this point, the aspects of the social relationships they form and their capabilities change. People with profound developmental disabilities are able to have co-worker relationships with other people in public spaces that provide appropriate affordance.
Unlike discussions of labor for disabled people, which have focused on showing that disabled people also have economic productivity or have criticized a capitalist society that makes disabled people unable to work and dehumanizes them, this paper examines what becomes possible through the motive of labor. Through this, unlike the discussion of de-institutionalization for disabled people, which has been conducted at the humanitarian, moralistic level or radical movement dimension, this thesis empirically examines what kind of social life can become possible for people with profound developmental disabilities after de-institutionalization.