Curriculum Vitae

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Areas of Interest: Sociology of Culture, Law and Society, Knowledge and Expertise, Carework and Disability

Education

Publications

Working Papers/Under Review

Dissertation Abstract

Autonomy is a basic cultural value that structures life in modern liberal society. Yet, traditional conceptions of autonomy, which highlight the separation of the individual from the social forces around them, contradict a core assumption of sociological thought: that the individual is embedded in society. What then are we to make of autonomy’s cultural power to structure the relationships and commitments a person has to others? Moreover, how do people maintain autonomous social identities despite the dependencies that structure modern life?

These questions are magnified in the lives of people with IDD because they occupy a liminal space between dependence and autonomy. While civil rights litigation in the 1970s fought for their right to independence and “normalized” lives in the community, adults with IDD are often dependent on ongoing support to do so. Through ethnographic inquiry at an independent living center for adults with IDD, called Moving Toward Independence in the Community (MTIC), I explore the daily negotiation of dependence and the construction of autonomous social identities for adults with IDD. In addition to illuminating how this population negotiates tensions between dependence and autonomy, this research explains a paradox in the cultural value of autonomy: that people are obligated to be autonomous by the social institutions around them.

I find that autonomous social identity emerges from relationships of interdependence when the actions of others are socially and temporally distanced from the autonomous person. In this sense, autonomy is not something an individual has but something attributed to them when action is interpreted within the context of sociotechnical systems. Staff at MTIC establish distance between their work and participants’ autonomous action by first refraining from doing things for participants and second, by framing dependence as a momentary state on the way to a more autonomous future. In doing so, they interpret participants as autonomous based on their productivity in daily life and progress toward future goals. These goals are redefined to reflect the progress participants make in learning new skills. The result is that autonomy remains an elusive goal that is always in the future. When this is the case, work toward autonomy becomes an obligation that structures an individual’s relationships with social institutions. I argue that this obligation is a basic mechanism through which institutions induce self-governance as a mechanism of social control.