Constitutive inclusions

This article challenges conventional critiques of institutions within disability studies and activism by drawing on fieldwork with a Catholic home and a Pentecostal school for people with intellectual disabilities in Uganda. Rather than stop at thinking about the institutional spaces of these Christian organizations as segregating exclusions from wider social life, this article approaches the work these institutions do in terms of inclusion – as constitutive inclusions, referring to the ways these organizations serve to underwrite not only the basic existence but also the personhood of their residents and students. In turn, such an analysis supports rethinking conventional Global North understandings of institutions as well as distinctions between total and social institutions.