Contemporary History of Inclusive EducationThe Ars Vivendi Project – Toward a World Living Together with Disability, Aging, Illness, and Difference
“Research on the movements of people with illnesses and disabilities” was rejected
I received a grant for research on the topic of “Contemporary History of Inclusive Education,’” but there is no way I could do it properly on my own. But thinking that people who could do this work would soon appear – sensing this kind of trend – I went ahead and bought some published materials (mostly used books I could obtain cheaply), organized other materials such as reports not offered for sale and various kinds of placards or leaflets, and put up several pages describing them on our website (http://www.arsvi.com/).
Most of these efforts were also a part of my “Research on the movements of people with illnesses and disabilities.” I applied for scientific research funding for this work but was not accepted. In fact for four years running I have applied for scientific research funding on the more grandiose theme of “the current era of the body,” but have failed to receive it. Thinking I should perhaps narrow my efforts, I rewrote my proposal. I have been publishing a series of works in Gendai shisō for a long time, and most of this revised text was published unaltered as the 118th installment (“Research on the movements of people with illnesses and disabilities – For the current era of life”) in this series (Gendai shisō, December 2015 Issue). It has also been posted in short segments on the Research Center for Ars Vivendi Facebook page and as a complete text on our website (http://www.arsvi.com/ts/20150118.htm) so that anyone can access it easily. I do not understand why the funding application has not been accepted. Maybe this lack of understanding is the reason I cannot succeed. But I see no way to change or rewrite my proposals, and I’m at a loss as to what else I might try.
Doing it anyway, or helping it get done
So there is no money, but I still want to take whatever small steps I can and have been writing about things related to these efforts in the Gendai shisō series mentioned above. Right now I am looking into things that have occurred at national sanatoria. This will eventually involve the stories of people with muscular dystrophy who began to replace tuberculosis patients in these institutions around the end of the 1960s.
When it comes to my own work, doing it on a small scale like this is actually the most efficient approach. I can avoid having to deal with various rules and regulations and things related to money. But of course there are limits – I can only do the work of one person. If I want more to be done overall, I have no choice but to have other people do it.
This is also part of why I continue to work at my current place of employment in spite of how taxing and onerous I find it. It is also the reason that I, while a complete amateur, have been reading books with which I am unfamiliar and writing about them – I’ve jumped right in and tried to just say what I thought could be said, and I hope that others will fill in the details.
The Ars Vivendi Project – Toward a world living together with disability, aging, illness, and difference
On March 31st we released a book entitled The Ars Vivendi Project – Toward a world living together with disability, aging, illness, and difference (Ritsumeikan University Research Center for Ars Vivendi ed., Seikatsu Shoin, 2,500 + Tax.) This text is broken into four chapters, “Contemporary history of survival,” “Ethnography of survival,” “Systems and policies surrounding survival,” “Science and technology related to survival,” and presents (quite long) quotations and descriptions of thirteen articles written by current and former graduate students. We had originally considered making it a kind of “textbook” that even students could easily read and understand, but having chosen the current format this no longer seemed feasible, and once we read the assembled manuscripts we realized that in practice it was indeed impossible. I then wrote a “Forward” (which I had been planning to write from the start) and a “Supplemental chapter” that had not been part of the original plan. In the supplemental chapter I tried to write in concrete terms about what the people I had been involved with were doing and the nature of my own past and present involvement. One other minor point is that there are now more than fifty people with whose research I have been deeply involved who have completed doctoral theses, and while they ought to also know each other this mutual familiarity is currently lacking. Thinking this was a missed opportunity, I wrote this text for them to get to know each other, particularly those who have just entered our department. In some places it gets quite detailed, but on the whole I think it will help people understand what research is being done and what research can be done. It is a book worth owning, although perhaps not for everyone. I hope you will buy a copy.
We reject love and justice – Person with cerebral palsy Hiroshi Yokota and “Aoi Shiba”
Hiroshi Yokota, Shinya Tateiwa and Masaki Usui’s We Reject Love and Justice – Person with cerebral palsy Hiroshi Yokota and “Aoi Shiba” (Seikatsu Shoin) is another book related to the “Research on the movements of people with illnesses and disabilities” discussed above. Its publication date was March 25th of this year. I interviewed Hiroshi Yokota, who passed away in 2013, three times, and two of these conversations are reproduced in this text along with extensive notes. The other interview is included in Questions from a rejected life – Living as a person with cerebral palsy: collected interviews with Hiroshi Yokota (Gendai Shokan, 2004), but this book is now out of print. Masaki Usui (currently an educator at Kanagawa University of Human Services), who was an adversary of Yokota’s as a Kanagawa Prefecture civil servant but eventually formed a long-lasting friendship with him, put together We reject love and justice and wrote four chapters about Yokota. I think this is also a very interesting book. Both We Reject Love and Justice and The Ars Vivendi Project are introduced on my twitter feed and the Research Center for Ars Vivendi’s Facebook page. Please see these links for more information about them.
Related projects
- Contemporary History of Inclusive Education
