The position that institutions as institutions are inherently violent, as the practices of incarceration with the corresponding removal of any form of self-advocacy are violent actions and inevitably cause further violence, was formulated by the professor of the Pedagogical Department of Elementary Education of the AUTH, Giota Karagianni, speaking at the conference entitled ” Disabled Lives Matter: critically examining misdisability and idealized normality’, organized by the AUTH Department, in collaboration with AUTH’s Pedagogical Research and Applications in Education Laboratory, the University of Sheffield and iHuman.

“Humiliation, neglect, insult to human dignity, physical and sexual abuse are practices that characterize institutional violence in institutions for the disabled,” said Ms. Karagianni, noting that in the Greek literature, the violence observed in institutions, with any of the above forms, has not been thoroughly discussed and is rather considered a remnant of older social attitudes towards disability. “In recent years, the issue of institutional violence has been silenced in political discourse and replaced by the simplistic argumentation of institutional mismanagement,” he observed.

The institutions of asylums and institutions devised in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to manage the marginal strata were “replaced” by special care institutions as medical science entered the management of social phenomena. Disabled people, as the professor mentioned, began to be separated on the basis of harm and dangerousness and institutionalized in places that never lost their asylum form, while the population of these institutions increased during the economic crisis in Greece.

Ms. Karagianni highlighted the need to map the changing approach to disability and create a collective body that can spark lively public dialogues around the best ways to promote social acceptance of disability.

Inclusive education from the perspective of Disability Studies was spoken by the professor of the Pedagogical Department of Primary Education of EKPA Anastasia Vlachos, noting that it is a fundamental human and social right and a process of systemic reform in education that aims to eliminate obstacles, allowing all students to experience learning experiences and participate in learning environments with their peers.

In the Conference that will continue tomorrow and Sunday, academics and researchers from the universities of Sheffield, Exeter, Sydney, Cyprus, EKPA, DPTH and AUTH, as well as activists, will participate with presentations, with the aim of highlighting issues of theorizing disability on the basis of materialist and poststructuralist approaches – distanced from biological, medical, normative theories of idealized normality – and to propose educational and social policies at national and international level.