Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2021
Abstract
In the text, we describe the formation of (new socialist) defectology (1953), a discipline which in the first years of the Czechoslovak communist regime proposed a vision of better lives for people with disabilities, a vision associated with the redefinition of their normality. Our aim is to show how the turn towards socialist utopia underpinned by expertise stimulated the formation of new expert knowledge within the new political order.
The idealistic planning and the inclusiveness of the then prevailing (Czechoslovak) Stalinist discourse helped to change fields of expert knowledge that had long been on the fringes of social interest into established disciplines.