How can we ensure that people with intellectual disabilities participate fully in political life? What lessons can we learn from communities of care in which disabled and non-disabled people live together? And what should be the relationship between local communities of care and wider social and political structures?
These are some of the questions we explore in this episode, with Lorraine Krall McCrary. Lorraine is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wabash College, a liberal arts school in Indiana, and a research associate at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. She has a doctorate in political theory from Georgetown University and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at Villanova University. Lorraine's search brings together disability studies and feminist care ethics, and she also writes about topics in politics and literature, as well as the relationship between the family and politics. Lorraine is currently in the final stages of writing a book based on her most recent research, with the working title Care Communities: Politics in a Different Voice.
We discuss the following topics in this episode:
Lorraine's work as a political theorist and the roots of her interest in disability issues (02:35)
Hannah Arendt's theory of 'natality' (05:00)
Natality and the politics of birth at Auschwitz (07:36)
Bearing witness in dark times (10:45)
Lorraine's use of literary sources in her work on disability (12:40)
Jane Addams and the politics of human interconnectedness (16:05)
Lorraine's research with communities of care at L'Arche, Camphill, and Geel (21:13)
Towards a relational understanding of reason (28:58)
The idea of community in the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (33:00)
Jean Vanier and revelations of abuse at L'Arche (36:12)
Abuse as 'relational tyranny' (39:12)
The notion of subsidiarity in feminist care ethics and Catholic Social Teaching (44:08)
The role of the state in relation to communities of care (49:00)
Relational caring at a community level as cultivating a wider sense of social solidarity (52:57)
Future directions for Lorraine's research (56:20)
A selection of Lorraine's publications
'Geel's Family Care Tradition: Care, Communities, and the Social Inclusion of Persons with Disability' (2017)
'Re-Envisioning Independence and Community: Critiques from the Independent Living Movement and L'Arche' (2017)
'Natality and Disability: From Augustine to Arendt and Back' (2018)
'From Hull-House to Herland: Engaged and Extended Care in Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman' (2018)
'The Politics of Community: Care and Agency in People with Intellectual Disabilities at L'Arche' (2020)
'"A Crooked Cross": Disability and Community in Flannery O'Connor' (2021)
'Bearing Witness to Natality: The Politics of Birth at Auschwitz' (2022)
'Disability and Subsidiarity: Toward Social and Political Inclusion' (with Parker Gamble, 2024)
Other publications discussed in the episode
Joan Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice
Maurice Hamington, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Care Ethics
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Memoir on Pauperism
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage
Some of the thinkers, writers and activists mentioned in the episode
Hannah Arendt
Alexis de Tocqueville
Augustine
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
Pope Leo XIII
John Stuart Mill
Jane Addams
Alice Hamilton
Flannery O'Connor
Joan Tronto
Daniel Engster
Maurice Hamington
Sarah Lucas
Rudolf Steiner
Jean Vanier
Other relevant links
L'Arche
Camphill
Geel
Catholic Social Teaching
For a transcript of this episode, follow this link to the Careful Thinking Substack newsletter.
