Questions of Competence: Culture, Classification and Intellectual Disability

This collection argues for a new conceptualization of intellectual disability that stresses its cultural variability and social construction, and deemphasizes its medicalized, physiological nature. It is aimed at disability specialists in social anthropology, sociology, social policy, and psychology, and at the broader health/medical anthropology audience. It is novel and radical in its treatment of intellectual disability not purely as an inherent property of individuals, but also as a social phenomenon.