Colonization,Disability,and the Intranet

Introduction

Recently I was engaged in research that unearthed the image of disability located within English schools’ intranet sites (Hodkinson, in press). All electronic media contained within primary schools’ intranet sites, such as electronic textbooks, smartboard resources, computer games, teacher constructed and commercial worksheets, websites, teacher initiated photographs, and video clips were subject to analysis. This research had originated after a teacher informed me that the school’s intranet site provided a “safe space” ¹ for children to learn. A subsequent analysis located within such safe spaces revealed artifacts of disability limited and contextualized by medical deficit. These artifacts formed a social construction of disability based upon inexact scholarship, omission, and imbalanced information where negative conceptualizations, enabled perhaps by stereotypical beliefs, colonized the electronic landscape.

The Research Study—“The Space of Colonization”

The initial research examined the representation and treatment of disability, impairment, and disabled people within the electronic media employed within primary schools in England. The data collection was located within four randomly chosen state primary schools in the North-West of England. The research analyzed all the materials these schools had chosen to save upon their internal computer servers. In total 494 separate electronic resources were analyzed which included 4,485 illustrations, 930 photographs, hundreds of pages of text, and 59 video clips.

The original methodology employed prototext analysis (Bourdillion, 1992) within which content, textual, and discourse analysis were simultaneously employed to uncover the explicit and implicit message conveyed within the sample media (Johnsen, 1993). In uncovering the electronic media’s subcutaneous (Johnsen, 1993) layer the overall aim of this initial research had been to examine whether consciously or unconsciously these digital media promoted prejudices or stereotypical ideas about disability or “people with impairments” (Fritzsche, 1992).

Phase one of the research, the macroanalysis, involved each electronic media being examined section by section, with sections which referenced disability, people with impairments, or disability issues being demarcated (Commeyras & Alvermann, 1996; Ninnes, 2002). Within phase two, the microanalysis, the demarcated sections were examined using linguistic analysis (Crawford, 2004). Here linguistic forms within the text such as the lexicon, agency and action, voice, verbs, and adjectives (Ninnes, 2002) were analyzed to reveal any, “hidden assumptions” about disability and people with impairments (Crawford, 2004, p. 21). Particular attention was given during this analysis to the positionality of intellectual impairments within the text. During this phase, a frequency and space analysis were also conducted; simple counting and calculating of the discrete sections examined how frequently disability and people with impairments were mentioned. Finally, an examination of the images within the electronic media was undertaken. This involved an examination of the people, categorized by “race, disability, impairment, and gender” who were shown in the photographs, illustrations, and video clips (Johnsen, 1993).

Historical Archaeology

In exploration of this territorialization my intellectual endeavor therefore became one of the analysis of the cultural image of individuals and communities in transition into this new electronic space. Whilst the original prototext analysis had unearthed an “artifact of disability” it became clear that it had no meaningful analytical power to decipher what these artifacts said of their constructing culture. Nor, did this methodological technique have explanatory power to reveal how the images and texts might have been employed to celebrate or marginalize communities dependent upon a continuity of traditions (Meskell, 2007). Moving away from the more quantitative aspects of prototext analysis I searched for a theoretical framework to enable analysis of these static artifacts. Of course I might have (and indeed will in the future) interviewed the interlocutors of these artifacts. At this stage though this would have introduced meditative interpretations in the comparing of tropes and tropoi from decontextualized disparate times, places, and people. In line with anthropological traditions of Pels (1997, p. 168) I wanted to, “better understand the relevant context of specific utterances and symbols”. What drew my attention, the question I kept asking was—what if this were all we had to examine the Zeitgeist of this period and to create knowledge of this civilization? This question upended my thought process as the intranet became reconceptualized as an archaeological dig and protext analysis the mere trowel of discovery.

Such thoughts brought me to historical archaeology whose analytic techniques operating in a, “fast changing and dynamic field” (Majewski & Gaimster, 2009, p. xvi), offered the type of logic I had been searching for (Hudson, 2010). Application of these techniques provided a theoretical framework built upon an analysis of the active formulation of identity which focuses surveillance onto the, “dominant groups sense of ‘self’” (see Chapman, 1989, p. 19). As such, historical archaeology develops alternate means of looking for the archaeology of marginalized groups. (Funari et al., 1999). To impose a, “single coherent definition [though] belies the diversity of theory and methods evident in its application.” (Funari et al., 1999, p. 17). Historical archaeology is then a hybrid, innovative, improvisational, and context dependent method. Its interdisciplinary approaches tailored to specific situations link human cultural behaviors of present peoples with their past material residues. What held my attention was historical archaeology’s stated aim which is to, “ironicize master narratives” (Funari et al., 1999, p. 17).

This exploitation of the mosaic of traditional disciplines of archaeology and ethnography (Meskell, 2007) provided explanatory mechanisms of property and processes which enabled simple correlates between materials and so called static phenomenon to be provided (Roux, 2007). Historical archaeology though does not assume that living people are frozen relics of the past but that strands of connection exist between the past and living communities (Meskell, 2007). From this perspective the electronic media placed upon schools’ intranet sites became my static artifacts. They formed the link between the intranet present and a preintranet past. They had a story to tell, a story with temporal, spatial, and historical dimensions of the societal conceptualization of disability. As such, historical archaeology offered references to analytic data that would underpin the pyramid of inferences of the interpretive construct of these intranet sites (Roux, 2007). By the employment of this theoretical framework the article seeks to better illuminate the images and conceptualizations of disability culture left by the colonizers.

The Relic of Organization—Landscapes as Spatial Relationships

Ethnologists agree that landscapes as spatial relationships have utility and relevance which should direct attention to the ways in which the past and present are embedded in culturally informed practices (Simon, Whitehead, & Heckenberger, 2010). Auge (1995, p. 42) like Shields (1997) believes the prima facie concern of the ethnologist is to decipher, “the manner in which a place is organised” and to pay close attention to the layout of villages and their arrangements of house and to observe these as a transcription of space. Pels (1997) further supports this contention adding that any analysis of colonial cartographies (Simon et al., 2010, p. 125), such as the one forwarded here, must interpret the, “nontactile dimensions of social practices such as the arrangement of building”. In the next section of the article, therefore, I sketch out an argument that within this system of organizational control of the intranet rematerialized the administrative control of the plantation settlement. This then was the strong point of occupation that as in European colonization provided the model for the enslavement of this society’s conceptualization of disability (Pels, 1997). The organizational construct of space formulated here therefore recast me as the ethnologist who, following after the missionaries and first waves of settlers, aimed to decipher the geography and people of this new space and digital age (Auge, 1995).

The “Field Notes”

My initial exploration of schools’ intranet sites highlighted a space of ordered regularity and conventional geometry (see Figure 1). As I gazed at the computer screen, small yellow folders shone forth, which were organized in serried ranks bounded by neat rows and columns of ordered space. With unerring regularity each intranet site was formulated within a hierarchical structure. Invariably, the first folder emplaced was labeled to represent a core subject ² —normally either literacy or numeracy—this was closely followed by science. Subsequent organization was less ordered but normally involved the foundation subjects of history, geography, religious education, and so forth. After this, folders became more random including such things as Christmas, school forms, school pictures, or registers. The more I observed these little yellow folders, these portmanteaus of organization, the more it resembled the order of my original school filing cabinet. This battered grey cubicle of space occupied the corner of my classroom silently maintaining control of paper copies of curriculum material and the general detritus of school life. The system of ordering I encountered on the intranet sites was the same. It employed this grey cabinet of order that I and generations of other teachers were familiar with. This then was a map of a landscape of a territory engraved on teacher’s souls (Bachelard, 1994]). The more time I spent observing these folders, the more they appeared as the roofs of houses, surrounded by neat and ordered streets. To employ the words of Bachelard (1994, p. 10) there seemed to be tight anthroposcomic ³ ties here and that a, “past history had come to dwell in these new houses.”

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Layout of the plantation settlements.

My field notes, my observations, of this landscape demarcated a managed garden rather than a pasture wilderness (Simon et al., 2010) where the synergy of habitat and people had produced not only a physical but an intellectual context for analysis (Simon et al., 2010). These plantation settlements dominated the space, a space which had witnessed a, “concrete ritual of emplacement” that appeared to reaffirm and reinstate old world orders (Auge 1995, p. 5). To me, this transition from one space to another mimicked that of the Achilpa tribe of Australia. The Achilpa when creating a new settlement implant a kauwa auwa—a sacred pole—in the ground around which they proportion and reproduce new space as a mould into which they recreate the order of past settlements (Auge, 1995). Here in this plantation settlement, as in many cultures, the individual house became the corner of the world (Bachelard, 1994). This village, ordered in a hierarchical fashion, was not in Bourdieu’s terms a paradigmatically silent habitat rather it had implicitly embedded a hierarchical structure into the social space (Shields, 1997). In this manifestation of society (Simon et al., 2010), highly stratified settlement patterns were observable. Here, in this electronic space literacy and numeracy, acting ideologically as the planter’s mansion, dominated the metaphorical high ground impacting on social and educational processes as in colonial plantation settlements.

The Ideology of Plantation Settlements

In its most basic form Radune (2005) details that the colonial definition of plantation was the literal planting of people into new ground in the establishment of a settlement. Orser (1990) elaborates plantations as discrete spatially bounded sites whose patterns of settlements reflected a system of centralized control. Whilst the prime function of these sites was agrarian, my attention focused on plantations as, “symbolic representations” which expressed power and control through, “settlement patterning” (Joseph, 1993, p. 59). Joseph, in a fascinating study of the origins of Carolina, in America, argues that the migration of Georgian architectural symmetry and geometry established a “plantation ideology” which stressed hierarchy, order, and control. Here, then, through, “carefully constructed landscapes” the planter, “geographically located” (Joseph, 1993, p. 59) and, “actively constructed plantation space” (Delle, 1999, p. 136) as an altar of control enabling the development of Omnipotent relations both on the plantation and beyond (Orser, 1990).

In this dynamic plantation, ideology enables a reference point as to how teachers ordered and controlled the intranet space. Here, the core subjects acted as the plantation mansion thus reflecting their, “physical and ideological visibility in contemporary society” (Orser, 1990, p. 121). The foundation subjects and other school materials were relegated and set aside as plantation shacks to be controlled from above and subservient to the core subjects. Within this bounded space and processes of colonization those residing in the plantation huts, the image of the inhabitant, was likewise heavily controlled.

The Processes of Colonialism: Control of the Populace

Historical archaeology’s central focus is the analysis of complex power relationships expressed in terms of concepts such as—domination/resistance, inequality, and colonizers/colonized (Funari et al., 1999). Of course we should not forget that the main battleground of colonialism was that of the control of land and of the implanting of settlements into distant territories (Said, 1993). Said (1993, p. xxi) relates though that colonization was not just about, “soldiers and cannons” but that its importance also resided in its, “forms . . . images and imaginings”. Within such terrains of dialectic and praxis the raison d’être of colonialism resides in its, “power to narrate, or to block narratives” (Said 1993, p. xii). Therefore, as Larson (2000, p. 40) succinctly accounts, “the power to represent the nation is already the power to dominate it.” Colonialism, then, as Comaroft details is always centered on managing heterogeneity and of dealing with difference by, “imposition, restriction, regulation and repression” (see Quayson, 2000, p. 112). Paradigmatically, therefore, Golberg (2000) believes that colonization is based upon complex antihegemonic theoretical orientations.

In Strathern’s (1991) view, complexity is inevitable in the cultural and social entailments of ethnographic phenomena such as colonialism but that is only through simplification that such complexity is truly revealed (see Quayson, 2000). The next section, therefore, details what is at one level just a very simple analysis of the artifact of disability unearthed within these intranet spaces. However, this analysis is also riddled with complexity as within it is captured the very processes of colonization in action. Such processes provide the critical foregrounding to a phenomenological shrinkage (Larson, 2000) of the, “ontological inscription of otherness” into this electronic geography (Quayson, 2000, p. 100). My following analysis, then, seeks in Quayson’s (2000, p. 100) terms to move away from analysis of the electronic environ as a, “domain of things” and moves the discussion forward to embrace the images of colonization as well. In forwarding this, my argument becomes relatively simple. This being that the artifact of disability uncovered may be read as a social text and that semioses of this text stands in place of an institutional consciousness thus substituting extant discourses of practices (Larson, 2000) for an Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia ⁴ sanitized telos. The complexity of cultural and social entailments formed here then relies on a telos which obviates the Disability Rights Agenda through the imposition of ideological misrepresentations (Larson 2000). These artifacts, bounded within the power discourse of the plantation settlements, revealed in my mind the enslavement of the history of disability rendering it as subaltern of the White, able-bodied male. Disability, as positive, within the epistemology of these Internet spaces became the banished ghost, one destined to roam at the margins of society (Larson 2000).

“Enslavement” of Image of Disability

The images encountered within the colonized space are noteworthy in several respects. A major finding of the research was the virtual absence of an image of disabled people within the architecture of colonization. Indeed, out of the 4,485 illustrations, 930 photographs and 59 video clips analyzed only 34 of the images found represented disability of which the commonly portrayed picture was physical disability. Indeed, no textual reference to or pictures of intellectual disabilities were observed. 26.5 % of these images portrayed wheelchair users of which only 8.8% were independent users, 7.7% showed people with a lower limb amputation, and 11.7% located disability within the image of a pirate. Of further interest was that only 8.8% of the images located disability within the image of a child. This represents less than 0.05% of the total images analyzed. Of concern was that only two images could be perceived to represent positive images of disability. A major finding from the study was that in the wealth of school-orientated images analyzed such as playgrounds, classrooms, swimming lessons, and school sports days no picture of disability was observable. The findings of the study highlighted that the most prevalent image the school children were introduced to was that of the White, nondisabled adult male.

Discussion

The data evidenced above, provide a narrative to the creation of a space of possibilities and how this chora ⁵ became striated into Euclidean space ⁶ by missionary teachers who came to colonize this undiscovered brave new world. A world which offered the prospect that disability might have become located within a new cultural framework. As Žižek (2009, p. 116) comments, “what can be more sublime than the creation of a new liberated territory of positive order of being which escapes the grasp of the existing order.” Problematically, whilst the colonial power ensured this world was safe from pornography and predatory pedophiles, other aspects of colonization were not subject to similar “control orders.” The contention forwarded is that the intranet here became an antidemocratic space controlled by a colonizing power who employed an axis mundi of “selective tradition” ⁷ (Williams, 1961) to striate, subjugate, and delineate electronic space with old world orders. Teachers, recast as missionaries, delivered a, “civilising and repressive force” reminiscent of Victorian cultural imperialism as they took up special positions, “at the juncture of colonial technologies of domination and self control” (Pels, 1997, p. 168). They became the masterful and pioneering power which codified, channeled, and regulated intranet space (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972). In creating their modernity of space, they built plantations of knowledge and identities whose architecture was domination and building materials were technologies of self (Van der Veer, 1995). As in the late 1800’s, missionary zeal here produced a “civilised” (in their eyes at least) image of a disabled indigene fit to be observed by the wave of subsequent settlers; the children who entered and explored this world in the name of education. This colonization, through “intranet plantations,” this expropriation of space left permanent legacies of an internal colonialism, of hegemony based on the sanitization of the image of the Other (Pels, 1997).

The uncovering of this artifact of disability felt uncomfortable. It raised the specter that a process of ethnic (or perhaps cultural) cleansing had been quietly and privately accomplished. It appeared that a genome, a media project had swept through this space clearing a, terra nullius ⁸ (See Meekosha, 2011). Here, expulsion of some settlers, the new indigenes, as illegal immigrants produced a private environ (Auge, 1995) whose residual artifact was a social hieroglyph of disability formed within a cultural cloak of bigotry and psychomedical pejorative traditions. Within this terra nullius only some spirits of the ancestors were brought to populate and animate this private geography (Kwon, n.d). Acting as hikpapa na’iyatakhiunas ⁹ teachers rather than sacrificing to the ancestors actually sacrificed some of the ancestors as the, “quintessence of humanity” became no humanity at all (Auge, 1995, p. 42). As in Vietnam after the expulsion of the American army the ancestor spirits were recategorized by the conquering force and so a strong ancestry of disability rights was relegated to the status of the ang bac (ghost) and thrown out from the new plantation settlements (Kwon, n.d). Societal control exercised in line with that of the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia sanitized the artifact of the indigene moulding it to inculcate settlers into a hegemony of an ableist society. This artifact of disability (its residual hieroglyph) became the hidden away refugee of equality. In this form, this Foucauldian leper was nonthreatening, subjugated, and controlled, whose placement at the borders of this new striated space was observed acceptable. This intranet space then had been subject to a territorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and I realized that disability here had become Pavlov-West’s (2009) “Irish theme pub.” Within this territory, then, a chain of clones a recreated reconceptualized essence of disability, of being and belonging, was mapped out within the fallacious architecture of the rustic model village. In this formalized culture a motif of reduction operated which made present, “an easily assimilable version of a complex reality” (David, 2001, p. 141) whilst absenting the concrete reality of impairment based upon an assumption of an ontology of being (See Chiesa, 1995).

Ways Forward—An Utopia of Hope

The narrative of this new world which has been sketched out above is both dark and oppressive. I want now though to suggest how control of this “disabling” narrative might be reclaimed by all and for all who wander this digital topography. Here, then, I sketch out a new cartography where the colonial mansions and plantation settlements are dismantled. In line with Block’s (1995) Utopia of hope, in this topography closed systems of oppression would be opened up and reframed. This future landscape—this “not-yet-consciousness” (Block, 1995) would observe the creation of a homeland of social justice where equality would stand as an achievable “state” and as alternate possibility to the created “rational” electronic society that now exits. The reforms I detail below articulate my own “wishful images” (Block, 1995).

Education in this landscape would be reframed within the principles of human rights, democracy, equity, and social justice within in which digital media and internetting technologies ultimate aim would be to develop schools’ intranet sites where all children could participate and be treated equally (Sandkull, 2005). In converting this aim into reality all material located into this electronic space must address “discrimination, equality . . . and the status of vulnerable groups in society” (Sandkull, 2005, p. 1). Paradoxically, I contend therefore that more control/ censorship of this “great space of internet democracy” ¹⁰ might actually bring forth education that is more culturally sensitive and democratic. In this form, education in this space would become a moral concept necessitating the expression of the values of self-fulfillment, self-determination, and equality. However, for Bernstein (1996) an essential prerequisite to the promotion of cultural democracy, is that the individual has the right to participate and to be included within society at a social, intellectual, and cultural level. For this new space to become effective the control of intranet and its digital media by teachers has then to be challenged. Schools have to recognize that relations of dominance exist in society and that obstacles to effective education have become embedded in simple everyday habits of this new electronic world (Slee, 2001). My belief is that if this world is to move beyond the “phenomena of structure” (Clough, 2005, p.74) and be built upon human rights and the democratic imperative it must give preference to strategies of empowerment. It is in the pursuance of this democratic imperative where the mediating role of the electronic media within this pedagogical space becomes most important. This space is within our grasp but if we want this world to become more humane and fair we need to reach out and take it one keystroke at a time.

Conclusion

Within the virtual space, the missionary teachers and colonial government had a unique opportunity to move beyond, “post-modern local narratives” and disturb their functions by producing a truth which intervened into the real perhaps causing, “it to change from within” (Žižek, 2009, p. 33). Here then was a new space of politic and possibilities, a chance to create a democratic, emancipatory, and perhaps even subversive world. However, the missionaries’ colonization has subjugated and striated this intranet space and so collapsed the, “space for a multitude of oscillations into a reality based on the reduction of open space” (Chiesa, 2009, p. 210). Deciphering of the organization and representation of the “disabled indigene,” through the theoretical framework of historical archaeology and colonialism, unearthed a cartography inscribed by a scalpel of old world geometry (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Colonization, here, acting as the “overcoding machine” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) has produced a “geometrico” of homogeneous space that determined the substance, form, and relations of the electronic environ. Disability, synthesized into this experience of reality became the Deleuzian virtual shadow, the ang bac, of its former ideological self. This locality then did not separate figures from affectations. Rather it (rein) forced morphological formulations as the primacy of the theorem element where people with impairments became segments of their segmentations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This new world then predicated on extant Lacanian Master–Signifier relationships was founded upon, “ . . . ground rules [which were] grounded only in themselves” (Žižek, 2009, p. 22). Thus, images captured within plantation ideology and over coded by old world geometry empowered phemenological reduction and the, “homogenising logic of the institution” to, “(re) produce a homogeneity of demographic” (Golberg, 2000, p. 73) which hollowed out this space as a site of emancipatory possibilities (Larson, 2000; Žižek, 2009). This framing of disability, its residual artifact, therefore hid from view, “differences and distinctions” which, “flowed through the heart of the colonizing darkness” (Golberg, 2000, p. 73). “Homogenising the heterogeneous” it fixed the, “flow and flux” with a praxis which rendered passive the strong and positive image of the ancestors (Golberg, 2000, p. 84). This colonized world rejected subjective experience and object materialism (Žižek, 2008) and constructed disability as a, “staged cultural reality of mental states or perhaps behavioral dispositions to all” (Interrationale, 2008, p.1).

The silence of the ancestors is deeply troubling, as initial ignoring (or perhaps lack of veneration) ultimately renders these indigenes as invisible (Golberg, 2000). For Said (1993, p. 14), the wonder of such, “representational exceptionalism” is that schooling becomes provisional in its outlook and action, “ . . . unchecked, uncritically accepted, recurring, replicated in the education of generation after generation”. One must question that if the settlers of this new world, the children exploring these environs, are repeatedly presented which such ideological formations what effect will this have on their conceptions of people with impairments? The answer to this perhaps, with the substitution of one word, comes from Said’s (1993, p. 24) influential text Culture and Imperialism,

The thing to be noticed about this kind of contemporary discourse, which assumes the primacy and even the complete centrality of the West [abilist] is how totalizing is its form, how all enveloping its attitudes and gestures, how much it shuts out even as it includes, compresses and consolidates. We suddenly find ourselves transported backward in time to the late nineteenth century.