Patrick Mckearney
Biographic Data
| ID | 587562 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Mckearney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Mckearney |
| SIGNATURE | MCKEARNEY P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8988-0101 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
At the Edges of Liberal Care: Disability and Ethics between Dependence and Freedom
Caring relationships bring to the fore two competing ethical impulses in liberal societies: to protect people and to leave them alone, to respect their vulnerability and to respect their freedom. Nowhere is this more true than in the contemporary care of people with intellectual disabilities in the British context this article focuses on. These individuals are in care because they have been classified as lacking the mental ability to look after t…
Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives
Intellectual Disability
‘Intellectual disability’ is a widely used psychiatric category that conceives of certain minds as impaired in their development. By approaching intellectual disability from a cross-cultural perspective, anthropology demonstrates how the condition is culturally variable. It shows, in particular, how intellectual disability is produced by different social expectations of ‘normal’ mental development and different ways of responding to adults who do…
Disabling violence: Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement
Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in the same relationship when caregivers pursue re…
Care
There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in p…
The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity
New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L'Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people's minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisi…
The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity
New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L’Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people’s minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisi…
What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles 'Dependence' in Liberal Societies
What expectations about the mind do people with intellectual disabilities depart from? A dominant argument maintains that their mental dependence troubles liberal relations premised upon a myth of autonomy. By analyzing the centrality of persuasion in a home for adults with intellectual disabilities in the UK, I ask instead about the psychological assumptions made by relationships of care. Persuasion aims to cultivate, not their independence from…
Mentally Fit: Negotiating the Boundaries of Cognitive Disability
Why do some people's minds seem conspicuous, disabled, and ill-fitting in some contexts and not others? This special issue presents articles about people in Jordan, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States who live with Down syndrome, autism, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, or histories of brain injuries. We focus on the disjunctive encounters between these individuals' minds and the varied relational processes in their surroun…
The Ability to Judge: Critique and Surprise in Theology, Anthropology, and L'Arche
What role does judgment play in certain kinds of critical anthropology and theology, and in attempts to bring the two disciplines together? I turn to L'Arche, a network of Christian communities in which people with 'intellectual disabilities' share life with the cognitively able that scholars commend as a critical alternative to our obsession with judging ability as the marker of moral worth. I describe how this evaluative stance on L'Arche faile…
Challenging Care: Professionally Not Knowing What Good Care Is
A dominant trope in the anthropology of care-of revealing a practice to be, despite our moral intuitions to the contrary, really a form of care-limits our understanding of the dynamic processes whereby care's morality is established in practice. In the British care sector the ideal of care is clear: avoiding coercion and neglect. There are manifold rules designed to hold carers accountable to realizing it. But the rules do not reliably lead to th…
The Weight of Living: Autonomy, Care, and Responsibility for the Self
What control should we have over our death? In this paper, I re-examine the way this question has been approached in the euthanasia debate by exploring what it means to take responsibility for one's own life, especially in the face of mental disability. I do so through presenting anthropological research on the role of care, autonomy, and responsibility in L'Arche—a Christian organization in the United Kingdom in which people with and without lea…
Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability
How valuable can people with mental disabilities be to others? In this article I present ethnographic material on L’Arche, a Christian charity that provides care. I describe how carers there are trained to see cognitive disability as producing not simply an absence of rational agency, but also the presence of a quite different way of actively inhabiting the world. I argue that, by learning to recognize and value this unusual kind of agency, carer…
L'Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City
This paper compares two ways of providing care for adults with learning disabilities in a British city. It explores how different ways of supporting those who are particularly dependent affect the kind of political belonging these individuals can achieve. Most care providers in Endsleigh see caring relationships as merely instrumental to enabling people with learning disabilities to be independent in their local 'community'. In this respect, they…
The Genre of Judgment: Description and Difficulty in the Anthropology of Ethics
What part should description play in coming to judgment? Questions about genre have become more important in religious ethics as many seek to reform “thin” models of ethical arbitration by recourse to artistic, literary, and historical descriptions in their texts. In this book discussion, I explore what the consequences would be of pursuing this reform by turning to social anthropology—a discipline that relies on extensive empirical descriptions.…
Challenging Care: Professionally Not Knowing What Good Care Is
A dominant trope in the anthropology of care-of revealing a practice to be, despite our moral intuitions to the contrary, really a form of care-limits our understanding of the dynamic processes whereby care's morality is established in practice. In the British care sector the ideal of care is clear: avoiding coercion and neglect. There are manifold rules designed to hold carers accountable to realizing it. But the rules do not reliably lead to th…
Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability
How valuable can people with mental disabilities be to others? In this article I present ethnographic material on L’Arche, a Christian charity that provides care. I describe how carers there are trained to see cognitive disability as producing not simply an absence of rational agency, but also the presence of a quite different way of actively inhabiting the world. I argue that, by learning to recognize and value this unusual kind of agency, carer…
L'Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City
This paper compares two ways of providing care for adults with learning disabilities in a British city. It explores how different ways of supporting those who are particularly dependent affect the kind of political belonging these individuals can achieve. Most care providers in Endsleigh see caring relationships as merely instrumental to enabling people with learning disabilities to be independent in their local 'community'. In this respect, they…
Disabling violence: Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement
Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in the same relationship when caregivers pursue re…
Mentally Fit: Negotiating the Boundaries of Cognitive Disability
Why do some people's minds seem conspicuous, disabled, and ill-fitting in some contexts and not others? This special issue presents articles about people in Jordan, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States who live with Down syndrome, autism, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, or histories of brain injuries. We focus on the disjunctive encounters between these individuals' minds and the varied relational processes in their surroun…
The Ability to Judge: Critique and Surprise in Theology, Anthropology, and L'Arche
What role does judgment play in certain kinds of critical anthropology and theology, and in attempts to bring the two disciplines together? I turn to L'Arche, a network of Christian communities in which people with 'intellectual disabilities' share life with the cognitively able that scholars commend as a critical alternative to our obsession with judging ability as the marker of moral worth. I describe how this evaluative stance on L'Arche faile…
What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles 'Dependence' in Liberal Societies
What expectations about the mind do people with intellectual disabilities depart from? A dominant argument maintains that their mental dependence troubles liberal relations premised upon a myth of autonomy. By analyzing the centrality of persuasion in a home for adults with intellectual disabilities in the UK, I ask instead about the psychological assumptions made by relationships of care. Persuasion aims to cultivate, not their independence from…
The Weight of Living: Autonomy, Care, and Responsibility for the Self
What control should we have over our death? In this paper, I re-examine the way this question has been approached in the euthanasia debate by exploring what it means to take responsibility for one's own life, especially in the face of mental disability. I do so through presenting anthropological research on the role of care, autonomy, and responsibility in L'Arche—a Christian organization in the United Kingdom in which people with and without lea…
The Genre of Judgment: Description and Difficulty in the Anthropology of Ethics
What part should description play in coming to judgment? Questions about genre have become more important in religious ethics as many seek to reform “thin” models of ethical arbitration by recourse to artistic, literary, and historical descriptions in their texts. In this book discussion, I explore what the consequences would be of pursuing this reform by turning to social anthropology—a discipline that relies on extensive empirical descriptions.…
L'Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City
This paper compares two ways of providing care for adults with learning disabilities in a British city. It explores how different ways of supporting those who are particularly dependent affect the kind of political belonging these individuals can achieve. Most care providers in Endsleigh see caring relationships as merely instrumental to enabling people with learning disabilities to be independent in their local 'community'. In this respect, they…
The Weight of Living: Autonomy, Care, and Responsibility for the Self
What control should we have over our death? In this paper, I re-examine the way this question has been approached in the euthanasia debate by exploring what it means to take responsibility for one's own life, especially in the face of mental disability. I do so through presenting anthropological research on the role of care, autonomy, and responsibility in L'Arche—a Christian organization in the United Kingdom in which people with and without lea…
Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability
How valuable can people with mental disabilities be to others? In this article I present ethnographic material on L’Arche, a Christian charity that provides care. I describe how carers there are trained to see cognitive disability as producing not simply an absence of rational agency, but also the presence of a quite different way of actively inhabiting the world. I argue that, by learning to recognize and value this unusual kind of agency, carer…
Challenging Care: Professionally Not Knowing What Good Care Is
A dominant trope in the anthropology of care-of revealing a practice to be, despite our moral intuitions to the contrary, really a form of care-limits our understanding of the dynamic processes whereby care's morality is established in practice. In the British care sector the ideal of care is clear: avoiding coercion and neglect. There are manifold rules designed to hold carers accountable to realizing it. But the rules do not reliably lead to th…
Care
There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in p…
The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity
New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L'Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people's minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisi…
The Limits of Knowing Other Minds: Intellectual Disability and the Challenge of Opacity
New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L’Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people’s minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisi…
What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles 'Dependence' in Liberal Societies
What expectations about the mind do people with intellectual disabilities depart from? A dominant argument maintains that their mental dependence troubles liberal relations premised upon a myth of autonomy. By analyzing the centrality of persuasion in a home for adults with intellectual disabilities in the UK, I ask instead about the psychological assumptions made by relationships of care. Persuasion aims to cultivate, not their independence from…
Mentally Fit: Negotiating the Boundaries of Cognitive Disability
Why do some people's minds seem conspicuous, disabled, and ill-fitting in some contexts and not others? This special issue presents articles about people in Jordan, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States who live with Down syndrome, autism, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, or histories of brain injuries. We focus on the disjunctive encounters between these individuals' minds and the varied relational processes in their surroun…
The Ability to Judge: Critique and Surprise in Theology, Anthropology, and L'Arche
What role does judgment play in certain kinds of critical anthropology and theology, and in attempts to bring the two disciplines together? I turn to L'Arche, a network of Christian communities in which people with 'intellectual disabilities' share life with the cognitively able that scholars commend as a critical alternative to our obsession with judging ability as the marker of moral worth. I describe how this evaluative stance on L'Arche faile…
Disabling violence: Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement
Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in the same relationship when caregivers pursue re…
Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives
Intellectual Disability
‘Intellectual disability’ is a widely used psychiatric category that conceives of certain minds as impaired in their development. By approaching intellectual disability from a cross-cultural perspective, anthropology demonstrates how the condition is culturally variable. It shows, in particular, how intellectual disability is produced by different social expectations of ‘normal’ mental development and different ways of responding to adults who do…
At the Edges of Liberal Care: Disability and Ethics between Dependence and Freedom
Caring relationships bring to the fore two competing ethical impulses in liberal societies: to protect people and to leave them alone, to respect their vulnerability and to respect their freedom. Nowhere is this more true than in the contemporary care of people with intellectual disabilities in the British context this article focuses on. These individuals are in care because they have been classified as lacking the mental ability to look after t…
Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Medicine (4 works)