Abstract
This article will discuss the relationship between anthropology and disability based on my fieldwork at a high school catering to special educational needs in Greece. More specifically, it will present the negotiating terms of the disabled anthropologist/teacher, who is conducting fieldwork inside and around the school area, as an example of autobiographical ethnography. I will explain the kind of perception and the degree of the identity that is the disabled person both as teacher and ethnographic researcher. These are two fields that ‘bother’ the disabled anthropologist/teacher and at the same time they create the condition for self-reflexivity on the nature of anthropology as well as teaching. Incidents that illustrate tensions, arguments, and collaboration with the informants (colleagues, students, parents, education officials, academics) during the participant observation, set up the template for the anthropological undertaking as well as the teaching procedure. This article also critically presents the events following the fieldwork when the anthropologist moves workplace by leaving the high school catering to special educational needs, where he taught and conducted the fieldwork, to teach at a general high school. This transition provides us with additional ethnographic data regarding the relationship between special education and general education by considering how students at the general high school then reacted to my fieldwork when I shared it as part of my social science teaching. This journey illustrates and explains why disability exists at the limit of the intersubjective experience inside the Greek educational system.
Highlights
This article will discuss the relationship between disability and education in Greece reflected in my anthropological study conducted in the ‘Quiet Place’, a high school catering to special educational needs in Athens, where I taught Social Sciences from 2004 until 2013.1 Approximately 80 male and female disabled students2 from 13 to 20 years o\f age with motor and/or intellectual impairment attend the aforementioned school
Through the narration of this course, I intended to discuss how disability develops in the various educational environments in Greece
The interaction generated by the ethnographic data from the Quiet Place between me and my students helped me to further clarify my own moral dilemmas concerning my presence in the research, as an anthropologist and as an educator and a disabled person
Summary
This article will discuss the relationship between disability and education in Greece reflected in my anthropological study conducted in the ‘Quiet Place’, a high school catering to special educational needs in Athens, where I taught Social Sciences from 2004 until 2013.1 Approximately 80 male and female disabled students2 from 13 to 20 years o\f age with motor and/or intellectual impairment attend the aforementioned school. The sight of the disabled students and the thoughts of their observers, expressed in terms of collegiality, create an intervening vacuum between visible bodies and invisible perceptions; a vacuum in which, it seems that, the student and school activity takes place in interaction with the wider social environment.
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