To speak or to write about one's work is a tricky path. As a researcher
of the beauty of human diversity, my archives are maps of discourses, and my
documents are people, as both the reader and myself.
Harmonizing different human patterns through behaviour, speech and
culture has been a growing effort on the domain of experiments, politics,
scientific interest and scholar writings since modernity. In what the
occidental world was concerned - stigmas and prejudices set apart yet not
forgotten - a general assumption grew that, with adequate means and training, a
disabled man or woman from the 18th century onwards, not only had the potential
but longed to be conditioned in the modern social grid. Contemporary concepts
such as neuroplasticity create different platforms of analysis for the human
body, its possibilities and impossibilities in communication, mobility and
sensorial perception.
Words, words, words. Essays on yesterday and on tomorrow, potential
versus absence wherever humanity acquires a pattern of existence. All these are
statements of a scientific discourse in motion.
What about social choreographies such as the ones issued from pedagogy?
Since their foundation, regular schools
performed on standard bodies and standard sense abilities. Hence the possible
concepts and contexts found for the words abnormal and normal, whereas embedded
on forthcoming social procedures, as Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault
deeply studied throught the praxis of modern states.
Assuming that inclusion and normalization were integrated in the
modernity schooling system as a unique and efficient technology, developed by
induced behaviour, the Enlightenment principles of equality between human
beings were reinforced, in a particular balance between self-management principles
and the socially expected. In other words, a technology not emerging from the
existant physical or sensorial abilities but uprising from each citizen’s
potentiality, therefore, the boom of the self-government principle: the most
normative way of being.
According to these propositions, my work and my writings start by an
overcome on the acknoledgement, personal, local or governamental, of normalized
bodies.
In other words, my senses as a researcher are directed to wherever
conscientious and empowered citizens are allowed to exist, independentely of
their physical and sensorial characteristics.
