I was recently sent a link to a paper (Antaki et al (2016) 'How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction' in the journal Sociology of Health & Illness) which I read with some interest ... although it was at times quite hard intellectual going (and there were no references to Intensive interaction in it, which I found somewhat disappointing to say the least!). However, this paper introduced me to a new issue (or concept, or possibly both) that I had never heard of, but that is associated with the analytic processes of Conversational Analysis. But it was something that I actually found quite interesting, and it spurred me to think a bit more about it.
This issue was one of 'epistemic asymmetry'; luckily they gave the uninformed reader (me) a useful explanation, which was:
'Epistemic status is the authority someone has to know about, and speak to, a given situation. Where there is an epistemic imbalance between two people, the one with less 'ownership' of the case will require a response from the one with more ... Given the intellectual limitations of people with SPID [Severe or Profound Intellectual Disabilities], the epistemic status of what they say (if it is intelligible) will be a very difficult matter to gauge, and may not reliably prompt a response in the same way as would an utterance by a neuro-typical person'.
So, without attending to the main thrust of the paper, this issue of an epistemic imbalance spurred me to think a bit more about the nature and frequency of situations encountered by people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities, where they will have less 'ownership' of the knowledge situated within any given context they are currently encountering. Such an epistemic imbalance will certainly be something they encounter on many occasions, and in many contexts that they might find themselves (often I suspect, not necessarily through their own choice).
But surely I thought, epistemic asymmetry can run two ways, and there should never be an assumption that a person with severe or profound intellectual disabilities is always going to be in a situation of knowing less than their communication partner about a topic around which a communication is initially focused, and then potentially further developed ... sometimes they will know more than their neuro-typical communication partner ... surely it all depends on the topic of that conversational exchange!
There have been many occasions when I have been sharing time and space with someone with severe or profound intellectual disabilities and felt like I was clearly the one who needed to do all the learning in the given situation, and thus set right any epistemic asymmetry (I feel like that most of the time, but now I have a name for it). I feel like this I think, because the conversational topic I am endeavouring to focus on in an Intensive Interaction engagement with someone with severe or profound intellectual disabilities, is the person themselves, and their communication strengths, and their currently evidenced activities and interests ... and also about their sometimes subtly expressed views about how they perceive me, and about how well (or otherwise) I am sociably responding to them.
So the imbalance in the 'ownership' of socially situated knowledge (which then goes on to create any subsequent epistemic asymmetry) is something we should look to address as often as possible; we should do this by making it our task to learn more about the person, and how they are experiencing the world around them ... and (I bet you've guessed it), we should do that by using Intensive Interaction to genuinely connect, and inter-subjectively share our knowledge of ourselves, and be with each other in an 'epistemically' symmetrical and therefore equitable way.
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