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The Bounds of Responsibility
Probing the Boundaries
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The Persons Hub

‘Living Responsibly: Reflecting on the Ethical Issues of Everyday Life’
2014
The Bounds of Responsibility
Edited by
Tadeusz Lewandowski and Elisabeta Gabriela Ilie
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-315-4
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2014. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Suicide and Responsibility 1

Gavin Fairbairn
Shaping Imaginary Geographies into Inclusive

Cities: Approaching Design for the Homeless 11
‘I Dream to Live on My Own Away from Family’:

From Dependence to Freedom, a Shared Dream by
Teens and Young Adults with Cognitive Disabilities 25
Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas
Acting Respectfully towards Adults with

Learning Disabilities 35
Gavin Fairbairn and Susan Fairbairn
Unethical Brotherly Love: Zell Kravinsky and

Maximum Human Utility 45
Tadeusz Lewandowski
What Should We Consume? 55

Virginia Gichuru
Markets that Disappoint: The Need for

Responsible Consumption 63
Steven Hinson
Responsibility and Restricted Economies 77

Domenico Cortese
Introduction

This volume touches on a diverse array of topics pertinent our fundamental
obligations toward others. The chapters are based on papers presented at the 4th
Global Conference on Responsible Living, organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net in
May of 2014, and held in Lisbon, Portugal. The delegates – a group of academics
representing four continents and nine counties from the USA and Kenya to the UK,
Italy, and Romania – offered highly innovative models and philosophies for
responsible living, covering the areas of consumption, bioethics, community
inclusion, disability, the EU debt crisis, and the body. Each presenter, nevertheless,
grappled with the central question of what we owe others, whether on the personal,
societal, industrial, governmental, or international level.
Naturally we all have, or likely should have, responsibilities to others. The
problem is how far these responsibilities are realised and extended, so as not to
result in a paternalism that creates dependence (which can harm both those who
give and those who receive), or conversely, ignore others’ vital needs (which can
lead to social breakdown and even the deaths of our fellow humans). All of the
following chapters examine the issue of responsibility’s limits in some way,
coming to conclusions of differing degrees, but agreeing on the imperative to
integrate some substantial philosophy of responsible living into both social
structures and everyday human behaviour. This book’s title, The Bounds of
Responsibility, is meant to suggest both how responsibilities should in some cases
be limited, and can often be limiting. For while we cannot take full responsibility
for all those we encounter, in whatever capacity, we can neither break away, in
good conscience, from the obligations that define humans and the social sphere in
which we live. This need for boundaries is reflected in the many questions the
following chapters ask, beginning with whether we, as (perhaps) the sole owners of
our bodies, may do with them what we will.
In the first chapter, Gavin Fairbairn confronts the question of where
responsibility lies when ‘attempted suicide’ fails. He examines the case of Claire
Burchell, who won £2.8 million in damages from the UK health service because
the ambulance service took too long to reach her after she had deliberately
swallowed a lethal concoction of pain killers and alcohol. Left an invalid, Fairbairn
suggests that responsibility for Burchell’s state falls not only on others, but
Burchell herself. This issue of whether those who commit suicide are responsible
for their actions opens the door to further questions concerning suicide being a
potentially responsible act (in some circumstances), or an act whose causes can
sometimes be found in the (irresponsible) actions of others.
The second chapter, authored by Elisabeta Gabriela Ilie, provides an excellent
example of how responsibility to others can be translated not only into public
policy, but public design. Her chapter pioneers a new, inclusive solution to an often
viii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
excluded portion of the urban population, the homeless. In challenging
conventional notions of urban planning, Ilie proposes a conceptual framework of
‘imaginary geographies,’ in which ‘homelessness narratives’ inform an inclusive
urban design theory that empowers the marginalised and facilitates self-expression.
Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas’s chapter presents both the story of her daughter
with a cognitive disability, adopted from Cambodia, combined with data from
interviews with youths with a similar disability in Los Angeles, California. Here
the issue of responsibility takes a differing cast, as she illustrates that support for
those with cognitive disabilities must be offered. Yet this involves, perhaps more
than anything, the need for caregivers to ‘let go,’ and allow those with disabilities
to assume responsibility in leading their own lives, and engaging in social life with
their own, unique voices. The dual solution of inclusion and independence, then,
constitutes the best manner in which to enable a person with a disability.
Continuing on the issue of the disabled, in chapter four Gavin and Susan
Fairbain provide another model of acting responsibly towards adults with learning
disabilities. They focus on the case of a close friend, ‘Jan,’ who uses children’s
songs with adults, and the criticism she received for their supposedly demeaning or
infantilising nature. The matter of ‘age-appropriateness,’ they argue, is muddled by
such simplistic reasoning, as judgments about whether such songs are irresponsible
or ethically dubious ignore the greater context in which the songs are utilised, and
the individual purposes and approaches of those who work with the disabled.
The theme of acting responsibly towards those who face more difficult lives
continues in Tadeusz Lewandowski’s chapter, which offers an examination of a
man who cannot stop claiming responsibility for others, Zell Kravinsky. In 2003
Kravinsky donated a kidney to a complete stranger and became a brief media
sensation through preaching his philosophy of ‘maximum human utility.’ With it,
Kravinsky justifies the death of healthier, well-off persons through lethal organ
donation to save the lives of others who may do more good in the world, or others
of greater number. However ostensibly altruistic, what Kravinsky ultimately
advocates the complete devaluation of the individual and the proliferation of self-
abnegation for the purpose of utilitarian calculations, in the name of an ethical
model for taking responsibility for others gone dangerously wrong.
The need for functioning, rational ethical models in our social structures is
taken up in Virginia Gichuru’s chapter on the ethically acceptability of GM foods
in Kenya, viewed through Aristotelian principles. In assessing the Kenyan
government’s efforts to maintain bio-safety in a world increasingly awash with
genetic modification, she focuses on what measures can be taken to achieve the
common good, namely food security and human dignity, and the possible pitfalls
of embracing modification. What is needed, argues Gichuru, is both scientific and
ethical education on the advantages and disadvantages of GM crops, coupled with
competent governance, before any far-reaching programme can be considered.
Tadeusz Lewandowski and Elisabeta Gabriela Ilie ix
__________________________________________________________________
The above ethical considerations of how to use the world’s resources and
achieve the common good is taken up in Steven Hinson subsequent chapter on
responsible consumption. Hinson presents an original model of consumption with
two good types, necessity and premium, and two generations, present and future, as
well as three proposed forms of ethical consumption: sympathetic, constrained, and
radically limited, designed to increase utility, decrease exploitation, and manage
the environment. In contrasting and comparing these models, a route to decreasing
the burning issues of geographical and generational economic inequality appears,
and does an implicit assessment of the boundaries and obligations that come with
consuming within the global economy.
As Domenico Cortese’s final chapter shows, Hinson’s interest in acting
responsibly within the often corrupt and exploitative global financial system
features dimensions beyond responsible consumption, reaching to the manner in
which governments handle the vicissitudes of the markets. Cortese’s chapter on the
ethics of the EU debt crisis and bailout argues that the path that causes least human
suffering is the most responsible, much different to the culture of austerity that has
developed within the discourses of capitalism. This discourse has become a
cultural attitude of responsibility in which repaying a debt outweighs
considerations of increasing human happiness, leading to suffering rather than
renewal and original thinking.
Perhaps the above reference to the importance of human well-being is a good
note on which to conclude, for the bounds of responsibility to ourselves and others,
as explored in all of these chapters, should obviously facilitate rather than deny this
fundamental aspiration. After all, encouraging others to be responsible for
themselves and others, living responsibly within the ethical boundaries we set for
ourselves, and adhering to those limits that ensure the common good, all seek to
diminish the harm our existence inevitably implies.
Suicide and Responsibility
Gavin Fairbairn
Abstract
In the paper I presented at Inter-Disciplinary.Net’s first conference on suicide in
2010, I discussed the question of where responsibility lies when ‘attempted
suicide’ goes wrong. My interest in that question was sparked by the story of
Claire Burchell, who in 2005 was awarded damages of £2.8 million when a UK
ambulance service admitted having taken too long to reach her after an emergency
call by her husband when he discovered that she had taken an overdose. I was
intrigued by the idea that responsibility for the devastatingly poor state in which
Mrs Burchell ended up could be laid solely at the door of those who had failed to
reach her in time. It seems to me that in Mrs Burchell’s case there was good reason
to consider that responsibility for that outcome might justifiably be shared more
widely. In particular it seemed (and seems) to me that in any suicidal or apparently
suicidal act, the protagonist, and in that instance Claire Burchell, must carry a
significant degree of responsibility for their fate, whether they live or die. In this
chapter I continue my exploration of responsibility in suicide, but expand my area
of interest to include successful as well as unsuccessful suicides. In doing so I
focus mainly on two questions: 1) Who is responsible for the results of a suicidal
or apparently suicidal act? 2) Can others be responsible for the suicidal act of one
who kills or tries to kill himself?
Key Words: Suicide, ‘attempted suicide,’ responsibility, Claire Burchell, self

destruction, self killing.
*****
Who is responsible when one person kills another in cold blood, having set out
to do so, because he wants the other person dead? In most countries, the answer
would be the same: the person who, for example, pulls the trigger of the gun,
poisons the drink or wields the knife that inflicts the fatal wound. Where the person
who does the killing does so with malicious or evil intent, he is guilty of murder,
because he is both causally and morally responsible for bringing about another’s
death, and did so with bad intentions. He is also responsible for other results of his
crime, including the distress experienced by the victim’s family and friends, and by
anyone else who is somehow touched by her death.
Suicide is like murder, because in each a person is killed, but it differs from
murder, because in suicide the person who dies also does the killing, or arranges
that his death occurs. Suicide is also akin to murder in the matter of responsibility,
because as in murder, in suicide the person who does the killing is causally and
2 Suicide and Responsibility
__________________________________________________________________
morally responsible both for the death he brings about, and for the distress that it
causes.
The suicidal and apparently suicidal acts in which people engage, raise
questions about the meaning of life and about the motivations that might underpin
a person’s act in ending or trying to end his life, or intentionally acting in such a
way that others believe that he tried to kill himself. They also raise a range of
interesting and important questions about responsibility, including the question of
whether suicide can sometimes be, not just a legitimate choice for an individual,
but a responsible one. Those who think that it can clearly believe that killing
oneself can be a valid choice in responsible living. They might argue, for example,
that someone who had reason to believe that she was a physical, emotional and
financial burden on her family, could both live and die responsibly by killing
herself, in order to relieve them of the worry for which her living was responsible.
More plausible examples of responsible suicide, to my mind, might be provided by
the stories of individual who arrange their deaths in order to draw attention to
matters of social and political importance. One well known example is the death in
Wenceslas Square in Prague, of Jan Palach, the Czech student who, in August
1968, suicided by setting fire to himself, to protest against the Soviet Union’s
invasion of Czechoslovakia. 1
In this chapter I want to devote most of my space to two other questions:
 Who is responsible for the results of a suicidal or apparently

suicidal act?
 Can others be responsible for the suicidal act of one who
kills or tries to kill himself?
1. Who Is Responsible for the Results of a Suicidal or Apparently Suicidal

Act?
In 2010 I presented a paper at another Inter-Disciplinary.Net conference, on
Making Sense of Suicide, in which, drawing on earlier work about the motivations
and intentions that can underpin acts that seem to have been motivated by a
protagonist’s intention to end his life, I began to raise some new questions about
responsibility in relation to suicidal acts, 2 focussing especially on the question of
where responsibility lies when ‘attempted suicide’ goes wrong.
I am interested in the differences between suicidal acts that are intended to end
in death, and apparently suicidal acts by which the protagonist does not intend to
die. Such acts include ‘suicide gestures’ in which the protagonist, ‘like an actor in a
one man play...stages, directs and performs in an enactment of his death’ 3 and acts
of a kind that I refer to as ‘cosmic roulette,’ in which a person gambles with his life
in a way that could bring his death. Neither the suicide gesturer nor the cosmic
gambler aims to achieve his death. Rather the gesturer intends to change his life, by
Gavin Fairbairn 3
__________________________________________________________________
changing the ways in which others think about him, and act towards him, while the
cosmic gambler invites god or the cosmos to decide whether he lives or dies.
There is a sense in which both the suicide gesturer and the cosmic gambler
abdicate (or attempt to abdicate) responsibility for themselves and their lives. The
suicide gesturer tries to offload responsibility for changing his life, onto those for
whose benefit he performs his gesture, and whose thinking and behaviour towards
him he hopes to change, while the cosmic gambler tries to offload responsibility
onto God or the cosmos, in this case, for his future or lack of a future.
Distinguishing between suicidal acts of different kinds is important, because
although someone for whom life is bad, who is unable or unwilling to use rational
means to change it, and who gestures suicide to draw attention to his distress,
undoubtedly needs help, it is likely to be unhelpful to treat him as if he has
survived an unequivocal attempt to kill hmself. And something similar is true of
those who puts their life into the balance by taking a cosmic gamble,
My interest in the question of where responsibility lies when suicide goes
wrong was sparked by the story of Claire Burchell, a British woman who, in 2005,
was awarded damages of £2.8 million when an overdose of painkillers combined
with alcohol, left her severely disabled. 4 Despite the fact that she intentionally
ingested the painkillers and alcohol that made hospital treatment necessary, with
the intention of ending her life, it was claimed that others were responsible for the
poor state in which she ended up – confined to a wheelchair; with severe memory
loss; weakness in her limbs and with rigid and simplistic thinking; that is why the
payment of £2.8 million was awarded. I was intrigued by the idea that
responsibility for Mrs Burchell’s devastatingly poor state, could be laid solely at
the door of those who had failed to reach her in time, despite the fact that they
admitted having taken longer than they should have done in reaching her. After all,
had Mrs Burchell not ingested the painkillers or drunk the alcohol that damaged
her, the ambulance crew would never have been involved.
In any suicidal or apparently suicidal act, the protagonist must carry a
significant degree of responsibility for her fate, whether she lives or dies. Of
course, surrounding most people who act suicidally or apparently suicidally, there
will be a network of others to whom some degree of responsibility might be
apportioned, because of things they have done or left undone. In Mrs Burchell’s
case these others might have included her doctor as well as her husband and other
family members. Nonetheless, anyone who acts in what seems like a suicidal
fashion is undoubtedly causally responsible for the results of his actions. And
unless for some reason he is incapable of acting responsibly, it is clear that he must
also carry the major share of moral responsibility for the results of his actions,
including any negative effects that they have on others.
Another take on the idea that others might somehow be responsible for the acts
of those who kill themselves or try to do so, lies at the centre of a number of stories
in Bateson’s book The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. 5 However,
__________________________________________________________________
rather than focussing as I have so far, on acts that do not lead to death, but to a
greatly reduced life, Bateson’s focuses on claims that the authorities who have
charge of the Golden Gate Bridge can be held responsible for the suicidal deaths of
those who jump from this iconic landmark, as if their failure to prevent such
individuals leaping from the bridge was the major factor in bringing about their
deaths. Sometimes those making such claims in the stories he discusses, go even
further, alleging that the authorities somehow encouraged the suicider to jump, by
failing to provide a suicide barrier to prevent prospective suiciders leaping to their
deaths.
Bateson paints a picture of the place that the Golden Gate Bridge occupies in
the imagination of the American people, as well of the part that it has played in the
lives of more than 1500 people who have jumped from it since it was built almost
80 years ago, most of whom have died. In doing so, he draws on stories about
families who have taken legal action against the authorities for failing to prevent
their loved one from jumping to their death. Among these is the story of the parents
of Kenneth Pattison, a nineteen year old who died after jumping from the bridge in
May 1977. 6 On May 27 that year, the fortieth anniversary of the bridge’s opening,
Pattison’s parents made a claim against the Bridge District, in which they argued
that ‘...the board was negligent in not providing a suicide barrier.’ 7 Their claim,
which was the first of its kind, did not seek financial redress; all they wanted was a
safe bridge. More than 20 years later Renee Milligan, whose 14 year old daughter
Marissa had jumped to her death, filed a lawsuit against the Golden Gate Bridge
District for ‘wrongful-death’ in December 2001. 8 She claimed that ‘Through their
acts and omissions,’ the defendants had ‘authorized, encouraged, and condoned
government-assisted suicide.’ 9 Like the Pattisons, she wanted, not financial
compensation, but to force the authorities to make the bridge safe by erecting a
‘suicide barrier.’ In their response to Milligan’s claims, the lawyers representing
the Bridge Authority pointed out that she could not show that her daughter had
used the bridge ‘with due care for the purpose for which it was designed.’ 10 Their
point was that since the bridge was not made for jumping from, but for travelling
across, anyone jumping from it was not using it for the purpose for which it was
intended. By implication, we might assume, responsibility for the results of using
the bridge for a purpose other than the one for which it was intended, must lie with
those who do so, and with no-one else.
Finally, Bateson discusses the case of Maria Martinez, 11 whose 32 year old son
Leonard’s body was never found after he jumped in June 1993. Her claim against
the Bridge District cited their ‘“failure to protect the public from access to
dangerous and unprotected bridge rails” and “failure to provide suicide protection
barriers.”’ 12 Disputing Martinez’s claim that the Bridge District was responsible
for her son’s death, an attorney argued that, ‘There’s no question that deliberately
jumping off a bridge that’s over 200 feet from the water is not exercising due
care.’ 13
Gavin Fairbairn 5
__________________________________________________________________
So far, in addressing the question of who is responsible for the results of a
suicidal or apparently suicidal act, I have focussed mainly on their effects on the
person who takes the suicidal or apparently suicidal action. I want now, to turn to
the effects those suicidal acts can have on others, because the results of suicide and
other apparently suicidal acts clearly include much more than the presence or
absence of a corpse in the mortuary.
In most, though not all instances of suicide, the families and friends of a person
who takes suicidal or apparently suicidal action will be traumatised, whether or not
he dies. The aftermath of suicide for families can be terrible. Consider, for
example, how Paula’s family must have suffered when one day, having eaten lunch
with them, she walked calmly to the garden shed, poured a gallon of petrol over
herself and set light to it, or how John’s parents felt when, following an apparently
irresolvable quarrel with them, he set fire to himself at the side of a major road.
The harm suffered by family and friends following less dramatic suicides than
these is, of course, just as real.
The harm that comes to those who love or care about a person who suicides
needs to be made public,to make it more likely that anyone who is contemplating
ending his life is aware of the harm he might cause to those he loves. Less
obviously, perhaps, we also need publicly to recognise the harm that can come to
people outside his family and close circle of friends. This group is quite large and
includes anyone who has had contact with him in the past, however fleeting, as
well as those whose contact with him comes after he is already dead, and
especially those who have to deal with the aftermath – with cleaning up
psychologically as well as physically, the mess he has left behind. Consider, for
example, the harm that came to Charlie Mansfield, a young policeman sent to
investigate complaints by residents in a block of flats, about a terrible smell in the
block, who discovered the decomposing body of a man who had killed himself
some weeks earlier, or to the young man, who in a causal sense at least, was
responsible for the death of Orlane Reaper when she threw herself in front of his
car, dying horribly as a result.
2. Can Others Be Responsible for the Suicidal Act of One Who Kills or Tries
to Kill Himself?
Earlier I addressed the question of whether another person can be held
responsible, because, for example, he did not prevent another person acting so as to
end his life, or did not act in ways that saved his life after he had taken such action.
I want, finally, to turn to situations in which we might be inclined to consider
another or others responsible for pushing a person towards suicidal action. There
are many instances of this kind in history and in literature.
For example, in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, 14 Juliet, in an effort to
avoid a marriage she does not want, drinks a potion that allows her to feign death
by sending her to sleep in a way that conveys to others the impression of death.
__________________________________________________________________
Her ruse is so successful that when Romeo hears the tragic news of her ‘death,’ he
goes to the crypt, drinks the poison he has bought to kill himself and dies beside
her. Finding him dead when she wakes up a short time later, Juliet kisses him in the
hope that enough poison remains on his lips to kill her, and then finishes the job by
stabbing herself with a dagger.
Juliet was responsible for Romeo’s death and he was responsible for hers,
though neither intended to drive the other to suicide. There are, however, situations
in which individuals are deliberately driven to suicide by others. In German the
term ‘Jemanden selbstmorden,’ literally to self-kill or suicide somebody, describes
the kind of situation I have in mind here. 15 A recently broadcast Belgian crime
drama, entitled Salamander 16 in English, featured several examples of the kind of
thing I have in mind, in which public figures, faced with the prospect of a life
ruined by exposure for serious and/or embarrassing misdemeanours, often of a
personal kind, suicide, rather than living with the results of such exposure. And in
history one situation in which it is claimed that an individual was ‘suicided’ by
others is found in the death of the composer Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky, who some
people, including Holden, 17 believe was driven to suicide by a so called ‘court of
honour’ convened by a group of friends from the school he had attended. These
friends, it is alleged, were so affronted by his homosexual inclinations and
behaviour, and by the disgrace that they believed it brought on the school they all
attended and on them as former students, that they drove him to suicide.
So far the situations I have examined, in which one person has responsibility
for another’s suicide, because he induces or even drives the other to kill himself,
have come either from fiction or from history. However, there are a great many
examples in real life and in the present day, of situations in which people of all
ages, kill themselves because of the ways they are treated by others, and in drawing
to a close I want, briefly, to draw attention to some examples. The first concerns
Ania, a 14 year old girl in Gdańsk, Poland, who killed herself following an incident
at school on October 20, 2006, when she was hideously attacked by a group of
boys. Reporting the incident, Domańska writes:
A teacher leaves her classroom at Junior High School No. 2 in

Gdańsk. Five boys surround Ania, a beautiful, shy girl. They pull
her out from behind the desk and pull down her pants. Laughing
and swearing, they grope her and pretend to rape her. The 20-
minute incident is recorded on a mobile phone. 18
It was on the day after this incident that Ania used a skipping rope to hang herself
in her home.
Bullying, such as that suffered by Ania occurs everywhere and it is more and
more common for mobile phones and the internet to be involved, as in her story
and that of Holly Grogan, a 15 year old pupil at an English public school. On 16
Gavin Fairbairn 7
__________________________________________________________________
September 2009, Holly, who was said to have had a ‘zest for life,’ was killed by
oncoming traffic after jumping 30ft from a bridge onto a dual-carriageway, to
escape from the bullying she had suffered via her Facebook page. 19 Finally, and
moving to the US, in September 2010, is the story of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-
old student at Rutgers University, who jumped to his death from the George
Washington Bridge, when he found that his roommate had secretly streamed over
the internet, a romantic encounter he had had with another man. 20
Romeo and Juliet were each responsible for the suicide of the other, though
neither acted from bad intentions. By contrast, from the account I have shared,
Tchaikovsky may have been the victim of a so-called ‘court of honour,’ who
pushed him into killing himself to satisfy their sense of what is right, and were thus
responsible for his death. The three present day stories about young people who
killed themselves after being bullied mercilessly by peers, are all, like the story of
Tchaikovsky, examples of situations in which it seems clear that the bullies who
drove them to suicide are responsible for the fact that they died. I think this is the
case, regardless of how many people were involved in the bullying and regardless
of their part in it, or how a court of law would assess their part in driving another
person to suicide.
Notes
1
Charles University Multimedia project, Jan Palach, accessed 7 June 2014,
http://www.janpalach.cz/en.
2
Gavin Fairbairn, ‘Who Is Responsible When “Attempted Suicide” Goes
Wrong?’, in Making Sense of Suicide, eds. Kathy Mackay and Jann E. Schlimme
(Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014); Gavin Fairbairn, ‘Suicide, Assisted
Suicide and Euthanasia: When People Choose to Die, Does It Matter What We
Call It?’, Roczniki Psychologiczne [The Annals of Psychology] 12 (2009): 97-120;
Gavin Fairbairn, Contemplating Suicide: The Language and Ethics of Self Harm
(London: Routledge, 1995).
3
Fairbairn, ‘Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia’, 93.
4
W. Pavia, ‘Mother Wins £2.8 After Suicide Bid’, Times Online, 6 June 2005,
accessed 17 September 2009,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article746142.ece.
5
John Bateson, The Final Leap; Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).
6
Ibid., 40-41.
7
Ibid., 40.
8
Ibid., 55-57.
9
Ibid., 57.
10
Ibid.
__________________________________________________________________
11
Ibid., 67-70.
12
Ibid., 69.
13
Ibid.
14
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
15
David Daube, ‘The Linguistics of Suicide’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1
(1972): 387-437.
16
Ward Hulselmans, Salamander (Skyline Entertainment, 2012).
17
Anthony Holden, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995).
18
Anna Domańska, ‘The Shadow in Our Schools’, Warsaw Voice, 20 December
2006, accessed 28 October 2009, http://www.warsawvoice.pl/view/13372/.
19
Daily Telegraph, ‘Pupil, 15, Fell to Death after Accusation She Slept with Girl’s
Brother’, accessed 7 June 2014,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7369402/Pupil-15-fell-to-dea
th-after-accusation-she-slept-with-girls-brother.html.
20
Ed Pilkington, ‘Tyler Clementi, Student Outed as Gay on Internet, Jumps to His
Death’, accessed 4 June 2014,
http://www.theguardian.co,/world/2010/sep/30/tyler-clementi-gay-student-suicide.
Bibliography
Bate, Jonathan, and Eric Rasmussen. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
Bateson, John. The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
Charles University Multimedia Project. Jan Palach. Accessed 7 June 2014,

http://www.janpalach.cz/en.
Daily Telegraph. ‘Pupil, 15, Fell to Death after Accusation She Slept with Girl’s
Brother’. Accessed 7 June 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7369402/Pupil-15-fell-to-de
ath-after-accusation-she-slept-with-girls-brother.html.
Daube, David. ‘The Linguistics of Suicide’. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1

(1972): 387–437.
Domańska, Anna. ‘The Shadow in Our Schools’. Warsaw Voice, 20 December,

2006. Accessed 28 October 2009. http://www.warsawvoice.pl/view/13372/.
Gavin Fairbairn 9
__________________________________________________________________
Fairbairn, Gavin. Contemplating Suicide: The Language and Ethics of Self Harm.
London: Routledge, 1995.
———. ‘Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: When People Choose to Die,
Does It Matter What We Call It?’ Roczniki Psychologiczne [The Annals of
Psychology] 12 (2009): 97–120.
———. ‘Who Is Responsible When “Attempted Suicide” Goes Wrong?’. In

Making Sense of Suicide, edited by Kathy Mackay and Jann E. Schlimme. Oxford:
Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014.
Holden, Anthony. Tchaikovsky: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1995.
Hulselmans, Ward. Salamander. Skyline Entertainment, 2012.
Pavia, W. ‘Mother Wins £2.8 after Suicide Bid’. Times Online, June 2005.
Accessed 17 September 2009.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article746142.ece.
Pilkington, Ed. ‘Tyler Clementi, Student Outed as Gay on Internet, Jumps to His
Death’. Accessed 4 June 2014.
http://www.theguardian.co,/world/2010/sep/30/tyler-clementi-gay-student-suicide.
Gavin Fairbairn is an applied philosopher whose publications on, for example,

education, disability, suicide, reconciliation, and academic writing are underpinned
by interests in storytelling, empathy and respect for persons. Since 2012 he has
been Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Language at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Shaping Imaginary Geographies into Inclusive Cities:
Approaching Design for the Homeless
Abstract
Within the inclusive urban design debate, the mainstream research steps away from
traditional urban design ideals of place-making and deals predominantly with the
physical accessibility and free use of the built environment. This research
challenges commonly accepted notions of city-making, particularly urban
inclusivity by design, and the actual extent of this inclusion in the case of
marginalised groups. The chapter builds on sociological theories of socio-cultural
production of space/place and of the body in space in order to explore an
alternative to traditional approaches to inclusive urban design. The proposed
conceptual framework assumes the knowledge sprung from the in-place, lived-in
experiences of individuals to be invaluable to an inclusive urban design process.
The intent is to introduce imaginary geographies, personal embedded constructions
of the urban reality and one’s place in it, as potential disciplinary working
concepts. To probe this, the research uses the case of the homeless as an example
of urban marginalised groups. The underlining aim is to introduce the adopted
sociological toolset into the urban design discipline. The research starts from field-
collected urban narratives surrounding the urban homeless, which are subsequently
translated into a specific visual urban design language characterised by tracing and
mapping uses, significations, and appropriations of (public) space. Homeless
narratives constitute, as a result, the prime material to inform inclusive urban
design theory towards practices that are more empowering and involving of
contemporary excluded social groups at all stages of the urban design process. The
aim is to create a conceptual framework aware of a diversity of urban users, a
framework that supports and facilitates self-expressions of marginalised
individuals at different times in different places in the city.
Key Words: Inclusive urban design, the homeless, imaginary geographies.
*****
1. Rethinking Inclusive Urban Design

The city in its complexity is raw material for design disciplines’ theory and
practice foci. The present chapter is developed within the working framework of
one of these disciplines, namely urban design.
Within the discipline itself, a mounting concern for the quality of urban life for
those living and using the city has led to an on-going debate on equal access to
public space, under the umbrella concept of inclusive urban design. 1 However,
mainstream inclusive design research steps away from traditional urban design
12 Shaping Imaginary Geographies into Inclusive Cities
__________________________________________________________________
ideals of place-making, and deals predominantly with the physical accessibility and
free use of the built environment. 2 As a result, although inclusive urban design
theory promotes free, undifferentiated use of public space for all users alike, it has
its limitations in practice.
The present chapter starts by anchoring the inclusive urban design (InUD)
debate in the discipline’s specifically-established concerns of place-making.
Consequently, the inquiry goes forward by challenging commonly accepted
notions of urban inclusivity by design, and raises a multi-faceted discussion. On
the one hand, at a conceptual level, arguments of ‘inclusive urban design’ appear to
be vague and incomplete. On the other hand, urban design theory suggests a
narrow understanding of vulnerable city users as products and producers of
(public) space. Here, an alternative way of understanding and reading the city by
means of lived-in user experiences is proposed. This results in a switch in
theorising urban design place-making and InUD, a switch that draws with it a study
of little explored methods and tools with the potential to ultimately facilitate
documenting and producing the urban.
The increasing role of urban design at a societal level is clear in policy making
and has become an instrument for good governance. 3 Mainstream urban design
practices present themselves as beyond aesthetic concerns; they are commonly
regarded as facilitators of social cohesion. 4 Nevertheless, having the concept of
inclusion linked predominantly to fragmented communities is an indication of a
loose end in decision making processes.
Concepts of place-making remain at the core of urban design research, 5 as
approaches to understanding the urban experience are continuously re-evaluated. 6
In order for a debate on inclusive urban design practices to be valid within current
place-making concerns, alternative tools and methods are to be explored with the
aim of gaining knowledge about urban users’ reality, and consequently integrating
this into the urban design process.
This study argues for an alternative to previously laid out approaches to InUD.
This alternative takes the form of a proposed conceptual framework, that of
imaginary geographies, which assumes the experience-based gathered knowledge
of individuals living/using specific spaces to be invaluable to an inclusive urban
design process within those particular spaces.
By means of imaginary geographies, the aim is to document the everyday lived-
in experiences of the urban user in order to account for the diversity of lifeworlds
at the base of co-producing the city. 7 In this way, collected journey-narratives,
personal views of the world, of space, and one’s place in it, are meant to contribute
to unexplored understandings of the urban (experience) and city-making processes.
In the specific case of inclusive urban design inquiry, by learning from
marginalised groups, the city as a concept is subject to re-interpretation, with
implications for both urban design theory and practices.
Elisabeta Gabriela Ilie 13
__________________________________________________________________
The argument here is not for public spaces to be equally inclusive at all times
for all users, but rather for facilitating the creation of spaces sensitive to vulnerable
groups, which allow for difference.
The focus in this particular chapter is rooted in the context of recent world
economic dynamics, where levels of unemployment and poverty have increased
substantially, adding to a major societal problem: homelessness. 8
Mainstream research anchors homelessness in the socio-economic arena,
dependent on overlapping issues such as housing policies or employment. Rather
than discussing ‘homelessness’ as a mere outcome of external causes, this chapter
chooses to approach the homeless themselves, as individuals, by placing them in a
more socio-spatial context and aiming to understand them and their lived-in
experiences within the city. Framing relationships between the homeless and the
city is relevant for the urban design discipline, as ‘urban homelessness…is co-
constituted with the urban fabric; sidewalks, shelters…street…dust…trees.’ 9
The homeless are an inherent part of the city, a constitutive element of the
prime matter with which urban designers work. As such, overlooking this specific
group in design decision making is an indication of an insubstantial understanding
of the city and a fragmented urban design process. Secondly, in the context of a
broader intra-disciplinary debate, the homeless represent a challenging example of
underachieved urban inclusion. Furthermore, the homeless as a social group
represents an extreme case of urban marginalisation given the long-time
persistence of this urban issue and the group’s severe living conditions. Exploring
tools and methods to counteract urban exclusion in the case of the homeless could
therefore be the first attempt to engage differently with marginalisation processes
from an urban design perspective.
2. The Homeless City

With an estimated 100 million homeless people worldwide, 10 the homeless are
often dealt with as passive space users in design and decision-making processes
alike. National welfare systems form structures that are more likely to
institutionalise homelessness 11 rather than fighting it, leading to what M. Lancione
calls ‘the Foucauldian ‘economy of homelessness.’ 12 Night shelters and day
centres run on standardised working hours and cannot provide for the number of
incomers, kitchen soup barely gives enough nutrition to survive, social workers
and volunteers offer advice and training, but cannot guarantee the success or even
the opportunity of a job. 13 Seldom are people helped back into employment, even
when provided with affordable housing, as they lack the necessary support to fully
reintegrate back into society and perform successfully in their jobs. Too often, the
success stories come to account for a vicious circle of in-and-out-of
homelessness. 14
In recent years, homelessness as an urban (social) problem has become a
subject of frequent discussions in an attempt to tackle growing social problems.
__________________________________________________________________
However, most policy strategies have a top-down character, which contributes all
the more in perpetuating social differentiation and stigma. Moreover, such policies
regard the homeless as a homogenous group, in which needs and capabilities are
undifferentiated. In consequence, solutions are rarely tailored so as to meet
demands. Mainstream literature suggests that in many cases solutions for tackling
homelessness fail to act in the best interest of those living homeless, while in-place
policies and definitions of being homeless reinforce related discourses and
practices. 15 As a result, social inequalities and group vulnerabilities are enhanced
and (re)produced continuously. 16 Arguments for the human right to (a dignified)
life, 17 for local capital saving by investing in effective homeless care, 18 along with
concerns of public health and an overall better quality living environment, are
indicative of a need for alternative approaches to the spreading issue of
homelessness.
The homeless experience of the city adds new perspectives to current
understandings of place-making. Empirical knowledge suggests that homeless
individuals often use public space differently than the general public – a space that
allows for leisure and passing through versus a space that allows for the unfolding
of basic human life needs. Moreover, homeless spaces are at times different than
the mainstream ones – niches, corners, entrances, while other times they overlap –
public squares, parks, supermarket parking. When studied, these marginal public
spaces, 19 which embody being homeless in the city, raise questions on conventional
place-making categories such as transient places, or ‘non-places’ 20 of transition
elsewhere. 21 The mechanisms the homeless employ to interpret public space, to
inhabit and appropriate it, indicate this diversity, as they may well be different, at
times, to the mechanisms used by the general public.
Negotiations of the city often produce spaces of exclusion. Fenced in public
spaces (i.e. parks), regulated facilities (i.e. public toilets), or so-called anti-
homeless urban furniture (i.e. public seating with intermediary arm-rests) aim to
encourage the use of space for certain public users, while purposefully excluding
others. The exclusion is never unilateral, at times excluding other members of
vulnerable groups such as elderly users. 22 By documenting diverse experiences of
the urban everyday, the proposed conceptual framework of imaginary geographies
aims to explore ways of co-producing and living in the city, adding in this way to
more inclusive urban design practices.
For the most part, studies on the homeless are often performed from an
outsider’s point of view. The homeless themselves are too rarely given a voice, so
to say, and most significantly, they are seldom placed in the context of the
city/space they occupy. A number of case studies are recorded in the form of retold
stories. 23 Nevertheless, the knowledge on the subject remains conspicuously
insufficient, particularly in the field of urban design. 24 Although organisations such
as FEANTSA and CRISIS document homelessness in the city, there is a visible
absence of accounts of homelessness as a way of being in the city, of co-producing
__________________________________________________________________
(public) space and, most significantly, of the heterogeneous homeless as part of
place-making processes. It is this particular knowledge gap that needs to be
addressed in order for debates on city-making to account for this marginalised
group and in order to gain the necessary knowledge to provide increasingly tailored
solutions for homeless individuals.
By proposing imaginary geographies as part of designing the urban an overall
more empowering process is encouraged, in which the city is designed with those
marginalised instead of for them. In the example of homeless individuals, the
purpose is not to create public spaces more equipped to accommodate them. Far
from it, the aim is to incorporate in-place experiences and knowledge into
innovative solutions to effectively provide for their needs.
3. Reflecting on Imaginary Geographies

Homeless imaginary geographies in particular add to understandings of city-
making due to the group’s extreme living conditions. Given the specificities of
their situation and potential lifestyles, homeless sensory and emotional geographies
are likely to present particular concepts of aesthetics, comfort, and multi-sensorial
experience, concepts distinct from the mainstream ones that are commonly
assumed in design processes. Moreover, the image associated with the homeless by
the mainstream public – particular odours, surfaces, and visuals, build into specific
notions of an urban space. These in-place devices of socio-culturally constructing
the urban reality are fundamental to the concept of imaginary geographies,
drawing on H. Lefebvre’s theory on producing space, 25 where personal and
collective imaginaries alike contribute in shaping urban space in a continuous
process of co-creating the city. In other words, the meaning of a place is encoded
not so much in the character of the place itself, but in the user-embedded
significance, which comes with use of the space and lived-in experience.
From a post-structuralist perspective, the concept of constructing realities by
means of cultural signification extends beyond abstract notions of space on to
feelings of identity and the body itself, 26 where the latter is the one performing the
act of place-making, thus embodying the social world. 27 Understood from this
point of view, the homeless urban reality is culturally produced by the general
public as much as by the homeless themselves. An in-depth understanding of the
homeless in public space has highly theoretical and practical values for urban
design, with implications for other areas as well, such as social sciences and
policy-making.
The urban as such is, arguably, another socio-cultural construction, assuming
that places are not simply passive stages on which everyday life unfolds, but they
are the medium that structures and allows for the embodiment of the everyday. 28
Therefore, what is understood here by imaginary geographies is an elaborated
image of the city and the urban experience resulting from the mental constructions
of the other, space, and the socially performative self. In other words, imaginary
__________________________________________________________________
geographies reflect individual lifeworlds, 29 the way in which one thinks the world
and brings it into being, along with one’s being in the world. These imaginaries are
translated by means of narratives into discourses that lay the basis for one’s
constructed (urban) reality.
In this context, imaginary geographies act as a gathering concept that
documents lived-in (everyday) experiences, an ‘essential part of the way cities are
produced, reproduced and especially lived.’ 30
Tracing imaginary geographies poses a methodological challenge in how to
capture the everyday, the lived-in experiences of the urban space users.
An appropriate methodology aimed at accounting for lived-in experiences of
the everyday is possibly phenomenological, ‘for understanding subjective
experience, gaining insights into people’s motivations and actions, and cutting
through the clutter of taken-for-granted assumptions and conventional wisdom.’ 31
Contemporary urban design research is explorative of unconventional methods
to capture the experience of the continuously re-shaped space of the city. Walking
is increasingly used to represent time-space relations, as well as space and people
in motion. 32 As a scene for conducting unstructured interviews, but also for a non-
static observation of space, walking is an engaging method of talking about place
while being in place, 33 a ‘practice of our everyday lifeworld’ 34 as well as a ‘mode
of experiencing place and the city.’ 35 Tracing journeys in this way is bound to
reveal characteristics of the homeless urban reality that have escaped previous
understandings of place and city-making.
Photovoice is another relatively new method, reoccurring particularly in work
with vulnerable groups, 36 where space users photo-document space. In an attempt
to support public participation throughout decision-making processes, the above
methods allows for the recordings of city journeys taken through the eyes of space
users, and they have real potential for tracing the proposed imaginary geographies.
Engaging with these two methods in working with homeless individuals might be a
first step in re-assessing understandings and readings of the city, as well as a
potential epistemological re-evaluation of the homeless. Such a re-evaluation has
the potential to lead to more effective solutions in tackling homelessness, and
overall, more inclusive urban design practices, and perhaps more cohesive cities.
Homeless groups are increasingly more often subject to empowering projects,
whether in shelter design, 37 the policy making arena, 38 or entrepreneurial
initiatives such as the Big Issue magazine sellers, the Cardboard Citizens theatre
group, the Unseen Tours guide by former homeless, or the Café Art gallery artists.
This list is not exhaustive and it is a mere indicator of the creative resourcefulness
behind effective solutions for the homeless. As such, they hold value for the
inclusive urban design debate and open the path for exploring alternatives to
engaging with this specific group. What part is urban design likely to play is a
subject of further research. Given the conceptual malleability of the discipline,
InUD has great potential in acting as an agent of change, whether in creating
__________________________________________________________________
spaces that encourage resource-knowledge exchange, in supporting the formation
of community ties that may shield the more vulnerable members, or perhaps even
in facilitating the development of niche economies for the currently marginalised.
4. Discussion
The urban design discipline, in its present theoretic-methodological framework,
provides little account of how place is created by those living outside the
established social norms and mainstream cultural representations; moreover, the
city as a multi-layered discursive construction of marginalised groups appears to be
little understood and integrated into urban design processes. Such gaps in urban
knowledge need to be addressed in order to account for a diversity and plurality of
urban users and to actively design for urban inclusivity.
For inclusive urban design to be successful it implies not merely a change in
the physical form of the city, but a change in urban discourses, in popularised
images of the city and, ultimately, a change in societal attitudes.
Turning on to understandings and experiences of the city formed outside of
mainstream society, carries an unexplored ideological resource outside the
designer’s frame of thought. The urban reality is a cultural product constructed
from within, as well as from without, by means of in-place imaginaries; the urban
individual, as both result and co-producer of the city – image and materiality. In
order to document the knowledge along with lived-in experiences of the urban and
consequently translate them in a language familiar to the (inclusive) urban design
discipline, there is a need for an appropriate and coherent conceptual research
framework.
The present research places the concept of imaginary geographies at the core of
discussions on urban marginalisation/inclusion and, consequently, at the
foundation of urban design as the city/place-making debate.
In the particular case of the urban homeless, the unsuccessful outcomes of
projects and policies indicate an insufficient knowledge of the subject group and a
faulty set of tools adopted by decision makers. Therefore, more effective and
empowering modes to tackle homelessness are yet to be explored. Laying the
ground for a different approach requires a better understanding of those facing
homelessness, what constructs their reality, and how this reality takes form and
what characterises it. Engaging with the homeless from an urban design
perspective is to a certain extent an act of empowerment and has the potential to
lead to a higher quality inclusive urban environment, as far as this particular group
is concerned.
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
CABE, The Principles of Inclusive Design (They Include You) (London:
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment / CABE, 2006), accessed
10 March 2013,
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org.u
k/files/the-principles-of-inclusive-design.pdf.
2
Ibid.
3
Ali Madanipour, ‘Roles and Challenges of Urban Design’, Journal of Urban
Design 11, No. 2 (2006): 173-193, accessed 9 November 2011,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574800600644035.
4
DCLG, Statutory Homelessness (London: Department for Communities and
Local Government – Homeless Pages, 2011), accessed 10 December 2013,
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/264
836/Statutory_Homelessness_3rd_Quarter__Jul_-Sep__2013_England__2_.pdf.
5
Michael Savage, Gaynor Bagnal and Brian J. Longhurst, Globalization and
Belonging (London: SAGE, 2005), accessed 19 October 2013,
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hjxLAU2YjzsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1
&dq=Globalization+and+belonging&ots=JagUuRJCed&sig=2zF-Xyz68jSlrXdEu
y-1q-sUezA#v=onepage&q=Globalization%20and%20belonging&f=false.
6
Paola Jiron, ‘Mobility on the Move: Examining Urban Daily Mobility Practices
in Santiago de Chile’ (PhD Thesis, London School of Economics and Political
Science, 2008), accessed 5 March 2014,
http://vivienda.uchilefau.cl/extension/pdfs/PHD_Thesis_Jiron_Paola.pdf.
7
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System:
A Critique of Functionalist Reason Volume 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989).
8
OECD, Oslo Manual: Guidelines for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation Data
(Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development: Statistical
Office of the European Communities, 2005), accessed 5 January 2013,
http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/OECDOsloManual05_en.pdf.
9
Michele Lancione, ‘How Is Homelessness?’, European Journal of Homelessness
(FEANTSA 2013): 239, accessed 14 November 2013,
http://www.feantsaresearch.org/IMG/pdf/ml_tp.pdf.
10
Gustavo Capdevila, Human Rights: More Than 100 Million Homeless
Worldwide (Geneva: Inter Press Service News Agency, 2005), accessed 7 February
2013,
http://www.ipsnews.net/2005/03/human-rights-more-than-100-million-homelesswo
rldwide/.
__________________________________________________________________
11
Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco
(London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
12
Lancione, ‘How Is Homelessness?’, 237.
13
Paul Cloke et al., ‘Ethics, Reflexivity and Research: Encounters with Homeless
People’, Ethics, Place and Environment 3, No. 2 (2000): 133-154, accessed 8
November 2011, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/713665889; Gowan,
Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders.
14
Cloke, et al., ‘Ethics, Reflexivity and Research’.
15
Lancione, ‘How Is Homelessness?’, 238.
16
Dragana Avramov, ed. Coping with Homelessness: Issues to Be Tackled and
Best Practices in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999); Gowan, Hobos,
Hustlers, and Backsliders; Samira Kawash, ‘The Homeless Body’, Public Culture
10, No. 2 (1998): 319-339, accessed 21 January 2013,
http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/10/2/319.full.pdf.
17
Catarina de Albuquerque and Virginia Roaf, On the Right Track: Good Practices
in Realising the Rights to Water and Sanitation (Lisbon: United Nations, 2012),
accessed 7 April 2013,
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Water/BookonGoodPractices_en.pdf.
18
Alexandra Zavis, ‘Housing Project for Hard-Core Homeless Pays Off’, Los
Angeles Times (2012), accessed 23 May 2013,
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/08/local/la-me-0608-homeless-savings201206
08.
19
Ali Madanipour, ‘Marginal Public Spaces in European Cities’, Journal of Urban
Design 9, No. 3 (2004): 267-286, accessed 9 December 2013,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1357480042000283869.
20
Marc Auge, ‘From Places to Non-Places’, in Non-Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso Books,
1995), 75-115.
21
Jiron, ‘Mobility on the Move’.
22
Elizabeth Burton and Lynne Mitchell, Inclusive Urban Design: Streets for Life
(London: Routledge, 2013).
23
Cloke, et al., ‘Ethics, Reflexivity and Research’; Paul Koegel, ‘Through a
Different Lens: An Anthropological Perspective on the Homeless Mentally Ill’,
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 16, No. 1 (1992): 1-22, accessed 29 October
2011, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00054437.
24
Cloke, et al., ‘Ethics, Reflexivity and Research’; Kawash, ‘The Homeless Body’.
25
Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore
Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 63-181.
__________________________________________________________________
26
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York:
Routledge, 1999).
27
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking, trans.
Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
28
Jon Anderson, ‘Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of
Knowledge’, Area 36, No. 3 (2004): 254-261, accessed 1 November 2013,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00222.x/pdf;
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.
29
30
Stan Lester, ‘An Introduction to Phenomenological Research’, Stan Lester
Developments (1999): 1, accessed 15 August 2013,
http://www.psyking.net/HTMLobj-3825/Introduction_to_Phenomenological_Rese
arch-Lester.pdf.
31
32
Anderson, ‘Talking Whilst Walking’.
33
Ibid.
34
Filipa Matos Wunderlich, ‘Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space’,
Journal of Urban Design 13, No. 1 (2008): 126, accessed 28 March 2014,
http://www.walk21.com/papers/Zurich%2005%20Matos%20Walking%20and%20r
hythmicity%20sensing%20urban%20space.pdf.
35
Ibid.
36
Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, ‘Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and
Use for Participatory Needs Assessment’, Health Education and Behavior 24, No.
3 (1997): 369-387, accessed 7 September 2013,
http://heb.sagepub.com/content/24/3/369.full.pdf+html.
37
Caroline C. Wang, Jennifer L. Cash and Lisa S. Powers, ‘Who Knows the Streets
as Well as the Homeless? Promoting Personal and Community Action through
Photovoice’, Health Promotion Practice 1, No. 1 (2000): 81-89, accessed 7
September 2013, http://hpp.sagepub.com/content/1/1/81.full.pdf+html.
38
Emily Paradis and Janet Mosher, DO Something (Toronto: The Canadian
Homelessness Research Network Press, 2012), accessed 2 October 2013,
http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/CBPRwomenhomeless_report.pdf.
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‘I Dream to Live on My Own Away from Family’: From
Dependence to Freedom, a Shared Dream by Teens and Young
Adults with Cognitive Disabilities
Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas

Abstract
This study describes the experiences of teens and young adults with cognitive
disabilities, whose dreams often scream words of FREEDOM. While, non-disabled
teens enjoy a greater sense of freedom as they age, their peers with cognitive
disabilities tend to remain sheltered. The primary data sources are a set of open-
ended interviews with youths (18 to 22 years old) with cognitive disabilities in the
greater Los Angeles Area, and a collection of writings from these young adults.
Most of the data gathering is in the form of storytelling, which allows the
participant and the researcher to retell experience as-is, away from too much
convoluted academic analyses. Three major themes emerge from these stories: the
first one is: labeling as a door stopper (stigmatisation), the second one is about
families (caregivers) who are often over-protective, and the third one about society
at large, which seems to view young adults with cognitive disabilities as incapable,
asexual, and in much need of support. In sum, this chapter illustrates that while
supporting young adults with cognitive disabilities is very important, there is a real
need to learn to let go, and allow their voices to be part of the larger conversation
about freedom, love, social justice, access, and citizenship. In the end, many of the
stories tell a tale of similarities rather than of differences between and among non-
labeled peers.
Key Words: Cognitive disability, freedom, youth, stigmatisation, sexuality, social

justice, citizenship.
*****
1. The Night Thavory Moved

Midnight, December 31, 2011, in front of a door, a small red toy truck was
waiting for us. In one voice we hollered, ‘Move that truck!’ and just like the show
Extreme Makeover, Thavory moved the toy truck, the door opened, and there was
Dad inside, holding a camera, with light on. Thavory bounced while screaming:
‘My place!’ She inspected every single nook and cranny. We wore our New Year’s
hats along with 2012 plastic glasses and blew whistles, cheering for what would be
a life-changing event.
Our Cambodian princess with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, left in an orphanage,
was on board the flight to freedom. 1 A silent drive back home. A shift had
happened. Life as we knew it had changed. We opened the door of our house, not a
26 ‘I Dream to Live on My Own Away from Family’
__________________________________________________________________
sound, just silence, and darkness. We embraced with tears in our eyes. We had let
go… We looked at our phones and turned them off.
Twenty-two years later, what had been a fear, ‘letting go,’ has been put to rest.
Thavory has mastered the bus system, and found her routine, a life filled with
acting classes, martial arts, and volunteering. Her one bedroom flat is kept clean,
fresh, and always reflects a sense of pride.
This major event in our lives reminded me of how much deeper the issues of
disability and freedom are. Why are many young adults with disabilities often
denied the freedom to live as they wish? I pondered over this. I started to rethink
my position as a mother, as an educator, and as an advocate. Whose voice matters?
2. Whose Voice Matters?
We are here today, … but on behalf of millions of Americans

with disabilities. My book represents, not just my work, but the
work that we all want to do and could do. The burning of a copy
of my book symbolizes what the government does to us and our
talents and our efforts. … turns our dreams to ashes. 2
Longmore added fuel to my process. Over time, I became my daughter’s

advocate, her voice, her iron fist in the face of years of despair and rage over
everything from the looks to comments from others in public, in schools, and
sadly, from family members and friends. I sensed how sorry many felt about her
condition. She had difficulties mastering academic content, but she could name any
car, and she had an enormous capacity for love. I still feel her tiny arms around my
neck…
In becoming her voice, I silenced her! I loved her so much that my fear became
a silencer. I wondered how many people with disabilities had been silenced.
The project got off casually. I wanted to meet some youths with cognitive
disabilities, and understand how they see the world around them, using their words,
and sense of being. 3 A group between the ages 18 and 22 spent time with me. We
talked, we wrote, laughed, cried, and created a list including:
- Being independent
- Choosing a partner
- Feeling disabled
A. Being Independent
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better, whereas

enslavement is a certainty of the worst. 4
27 Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas
_______________________________________________________
‘I can be free’: Who would disagree? A sense of self seems keenly entangled
with a sense of freedom. As we sat around the table brainstorming about the
meaning of freedom, voices around the table started to shout: ‘I want to be
independent!’ The words seemed clear and the meaning understood. Concepts of
freedom and independence are complex notions intertwining cultural differences
and personal values. Listening to the debate about independence and freedom was
enlightening. I stopped myself from intruding to avoid any cross-thought invading
the space. Then silence. I asked if they would be willing to write. Desperate looks,
‘I am no good speller’ I replied: ‘What we are doing here is thinking not spelling,
your thoughts are powerful, go for it!’ The fear in their voices reminded me of the
pressure we put on spelling. In the process we shun the true inner voice. All bent
over the table, writing tools in hand, brainstorming about those concepts. No
sounds could be heard, words dancing above their heads. As we shared, Sophie
read: ‘You can prove them wrong!’ All eyes were on Sophie. She went on, saying
how she felt that everyone, including her family, felt that she would always need
help in everyday tasks. This realisation weighing on her shoulders and soul drove
her to cry. As her tears rolled down her cheeks, she explained how her mother kept
on taking care of her, and how desperately Sophie wanted to be her own. She
relayed her experiences in which often well-meaning teachers would pair her with
able students when she felt all she needed was time, not help. As Sophie shared,
many other voices relayed similar stories that started with good intentions but
hindered the growth process. Eric knew that he was in special education but did not
feel it was a problem until he realised: ‘I’be special all my life.’ All around, most
of the group felt that they were stopped from making their own choices, and being
true to themselves. I was admiring of how articulate and clear they were. The
feeling of trust we had established created a space for what I deemed to be a true,
candid, and honest conversation.
B. Making a Living
The issue of finding a job and making money kept on coming up in our
conversations. In the US, people with disabilities are entitled to Supplemental
Security Income (SSI), which is around $850 a month. The group as a whole,
including my daughter, comes from middle-class families and had thus enjoyed the
better side of life, without economic struggles. Access to college is precarious for
students with disabilities. Some colleges around the country offer programmes that
include students with cognitive disabilities. The types of jobs open to people with
cognitive disabilities are usually at the lower end of the salary scale.
Without hesitation, all wanted to find a well-paid job. During our discussion, I
realised many did not quite grasp the meaning of money’s value well enough. Most
of them were still under parental supervision and seemed to get cash as needed.
However, Eric told us that he would like to take an aptitude test. He wanted to
further his education. He said: ‘Go to school and take classes plus learn about what
__________________________________________________________________
the requirements are to know about having a certain job.’ He added: ‘I need to
make sure that this job makes a good amount of money to pay off the bills.’ This
realisation furthered my thoughts on the fact that we as a society still hinder their
growth. Based on our experience with Thavory, while she is not paying all her bills
at this point, she is mastering the concept of bills and how much to spend per week
in order to live. This learning has happened mostly because she lives on her own.
She has had to learn about being overdraft and how to deal with the situation.
When she got an overdraft, she was in tears – ‘I am so ashamed of myself.’ While I
consoled her, telling her that this is the learning curve as we grow up, remembering
that in my youth, I had been overdraft once or twice.
There is much work to do on this specific domain to support independence in
money management and locating a job.
C. Making Friends
A few months ago, when Thavory came to do a presentation about her life, her
last slide read:
- I do not have many friends; I wish I could have more.
As soon as she read this sentence, a voice rose: ‘I feel you!’ The group started
to talk about the feeling of loneliness and wanting to make more friends. The
discussion was painful to follow, as many expressed the fear of being alone and
having to rely on their families as a social network. I started to think about all the
dinners that I had at my house, filled with different people sharing laughter, stories,
and heated discussions that came up randomly around the table. I realised that
Thavory spends many evenings alone watching TV, using Facebook, and longing
for someone to share her physical and emotional space. As many young adults in
the group, most of her social-life is still very much linked to ours.
The group felt that making friends was a difficult task. I suspect that they have
low self-esteem, which seems to be the lot for many within the group. How do we
support the growth of self-esteem and love of self, regardless of abilities?
D. Choosing a Partner
Many would like to find a life-partner and some would rather stay alone, for a
while at least. While most state that they are straight, one is lesbian who happens
to be labelled as having autistic tendencies, which presents its own challenge as
described by Emily Brooks. In this specific case, finding a girlfriend is a huge
challenge. It seems that one possible option would be online dating. The challenge
is still on, not to mention the difficulty in talking about sexuality with people with
cognitive disabilities. A very important subject to tackle, which is not just about
safe sex, is getting a better grasp of the meaning of long or short term
_______________________________________________________
relationships. Marc is keen on finding a woman without a disability. When I asked
him why, he replied:
I know it is hard to have a disability, people look at you different

even if they do not say a word, you can feel, it makes me feel
dumb and useless, I do not want my girlfriend to feel the same
pain I feel!
Reflecting on Marc’s comment, I realise how looks and unsaid words can be as
powerful as mean words. Another issue to ponder in a more critical way is how
stigmatisation operates despite some of our best collective efforts to eliminate it.
Eric and Vanessa favoured partners with similar interests, who would be good
friends. Vanessa shared with the group:
I want to be with someone who can be my friend, if I cry or if I

am upset to be there and give me a hug. I want to be careful with
my partner because I want my partner to be careful with me!
I was surprised by what was not said, such as: ‘I would like a partner that could
please my family.’ I could feel the distance between their aspirations and their
families’ expectations, revealed by this new, open conversation, in which each of
the young adults was there to think and wonder about themselves as a single unit.
E. Getting Married
It all started with a laugh and a question: ‘Hey, Laurence, are you married?’ My
‘Yes’ made the whole group giggles. Due to the laughs and such, we pulled out our
writing tablets and pens to start writing about marriage. Marc started the
conversation: ‘Having a family is a big responsibility and a lot of stress, and while
we are on the subject, I am not sure I want to have children, I don’t really like to
deal with kids!’ Eric replied to him:
I know I want to get married to have a normal life, a lovely life. I

am sure if you find the right person then you can love each other
very, very much and I am sure I want to have children and I will
learn to be patient not like some people with me.
We all paused and looked at Eric. His voice was soft and calm, but we could all
feel his desire to live a ‘normal’ life. Sophie jumped in and added:
I would get married so you have someone to keep you company,

I don’t want to live my life all alone, I want somebody that will
love me so I want to get married.
__________________________________________________________________
Vanessa shook her head and made a little shrieking noise. We all turned to her. She
lifted her head and said in one breath: ‘I am not getting a partner I don’t think that
is the best for me I am choosing for what is best for me.’ For a moment, we all
turned to her and I could feel that we were not feeling at ease. Eric asked why she
really did not want to get married. She started to cry. We could barely hear her
voice. Slowly, I could make out the words coming out of her.
I look different, I know nobody will love me, I don’t want to

have sex, so I don’t want to think that maybe I could have a
husband and children even though I love children and I want to
work in a day-care.
Coupled with a cognitive disability, Vanessa has a congenital disorder that is

visible. It seems that she is very self-conscious about her appearance. Much
discussion is needed to figure out how to truly include all, not simply with our
words, as we seem to do well, but also in everyday practice. My heart is heavy
thinking that the road is long and what missed opportunities we all have had to be
truly inclusive.
Please Don’t Stare (excerpt)
By Ebb
Please don’t stare when you see me walking by
I can’t help being born differently
When people look at me like I’ve committed many crimes
Nobody is perfect and fault cannot be seen
But mine is on show to everyone because of an undeveloped
gene
But please don’t stare and leer at me cos inside my heart does
cry 5
F. Children
Naturally, our conversation went from marriage to children. I shared with the
group that I am the mother of three girls and being a mom was my favourite job.
They asked me multiple questions about birth, taking care of babies, and what to
do with school and homework. The nature of their questions was as enlightening as
the answers they gave about the subject: the desire to have children and parenting.
Aside from Vanessa, most seemed keen to have a family that would include
children. Eric explained that having children would be a good experience. He also
added: ‘I will love my kids no matter what, and would let them make their own
decisions.’ Eric’s comment made me think about parenting in general. It would be
nice if all of us were able to love our children as they are, and let them make their
_______________________________________________________
own decisions without any reservations. Sophie wanted to have a boy and girl
because she felt it would give her an opportunity to do what she likes: being girly
with a girl and doing sports with a boy. Gender lines are clear for Sophie. It is also
crucial to point out that mainstream America has clear gender lines for the most
part! Overall, our conversation about having a family brought us to the topic of our
families, and it how was growing up.
G. Family as a Tool to Become Independent

Each one of us shared his or her own experiences with their families as young
children and teenagers. As they were writing before sharing with the group, I
started to reminisce about how I raised Thavory, how many hours of pushing her,
and telling her how she would be able to do what she wanted later – while not sure
at all of what would happen, realising that my demands did not seem to match her
abilities. Secretly, I dreamt of protecting her forever; a dream that shattered when
thinking about my own mortality. A head went up. Vanessa: ‘My parents are trying
to force me to get married, so I will never be alone.’ Hearing her comments, Marc
said:
My parents help me find part-time job so I can learn some stuff,

but I can feel that they are afraid for me to live on my own. Ok,
their house is great, but I do not want to live with them all my
life!
One can start thinking: What to do? One side wants freedom; the other side wants
to make sure that their grown-up children are safe. Based on my experience, letting
go is a hard venture, but it also comes with great rewards for all!
Overall, the group agreed that their families could become a tool toward
independence. They all felt loved by their parents, but they were too present in
their lives, which in turn kept on infantilising them and discouraging them from
making choices pertinent to their aspirations, dreams, and sense of being.
H. Feeling Disabled
We will all be disabled at some point. However, being born with a cognitive
disability is a life condition. When asked what kind of disabilities were represented
in the group, most were able to say that they learned differently, but had no clear
explanation about their disability. The consensus seemed to cover learning
differences, which is true, but lacks clarity. Without knowing exactly what their
disabilities are about, they cannot teach others about their needs. Knowing about
themselves would help others better support them in their process towards
freedom.
__________________________________________________________________
I had made sure my daughter would be able to articulate notions about her
disability in order to empower her. Another idea to get to the road of independent
living is having the ability to name, and not point out!
3. The Invisible Pain, the Visible Disability

I realise much authentic work is needed to TRULY include ALL voices. The
pain shared via tone of voice and sense of fear has made me rethink much of what
is not done in the world of disability. We have come a long way in terms of
inclusion legally. However, inclusion as we know it now should be eradicated, and
we should support people, regardless of abilities, in finding their unique path
within our society. 6
Notes
1
Laurence E. Hadjas, ‘What Will My Child and I Learn Today?’ The Struggle of a
Parent of a Disabled Child (PhD diss. University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005).
2
Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burn My Book and Other Essays on Disability
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 258.
3
Max Van Mannen, Researching Lived Experiences. Human Science for an Action
Sensitive Pedagogy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990).
4
Albert Camus, Resistance Rebellion and Death: Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien
(New York: Vintage Press 1995 [1960]), 103.
5
Ebb, Please Don’t Stare, accessed 12 November 2013, http://www.disabled-
world.com/communication/poetry/, 2011.
6
Margret A. Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to
Integration (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1993).
Bibliography
Camus, Albert. Resistance Rebellion and Death: Essays. Translated by Justin
O’Brien. New York: Vintage Press, 1995 [1960].
Ebb. Please Don’t Stare. Accessed 12 November 2013. http://www.disabled-

world.com/communication/poetry/, 2011.
Hadjas, Laurence E. ‘What Will My Child and I Learn Today?’ The Struggle of a
Parent of a Disabled Child. PhD diss. University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005.
Kaufman, Sandra Z. Retarded Isn’t Stupid, Mom! Baltimore, MD: Brookes

Publishing Co., 1988.
_______________________________________________________
Leavy, Patricia. Fiction as Research Practice Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013
Longmore, Paul K. Why I Burn My Book and Other Essays on Disability.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Radziewicz, Sheila. I Am Not. Accessed 15 September 2012.

http://www.disaheilabledworld.com/communication/poetry/, 2011.
Smith, J. David. In Search of Better Angels: Stories of Disability in the Human

Family. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003.
Smith, Robin, M., and Nirmala Erevelles. ‘Towards Enabling Education: The
Difference that Disability Makes’. Educational Researcher 33, No. 8 (November,
2004).
Taylor, George R. Parental Involvement. A Practical Guide for Collaboration and

Teamwork for Students with Disabilities. Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas Pub,
2000.
Van Mannen, Max. Researching Lived Experiences. Human Science for an Action
Sensitive Pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Winzer, Margret A. The History of Special Education: From Isolation to

Integration. Washngton, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1993.
Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas, PhD, is a lecturer at UCLA Extension in the

Pathway Program. She recently decided to leave traditional academia to focus on
writing about issues surrounding disability.
Acting Respectfully towards Adults with Learning Disabilities
Gavin Fairbairn and Susan Fairbairn

Abstract
Adults with learning difficulties are often treated as if they are children, just
because they find certain everyday tasks more difficult than other people. As a
result, those who spend time with such adults typically take very seriously the need
to find ways of relating to them respectfully, while offering support aimed at
meeting their special needs. In this chapter, beginning with a story about a dear
friend, we want to raise some issues that can arise from the attempt to balance
these two aims, when it is underpinned by blind adherence to a questionable ideal.
Our friend Jan spends most of her time working in a vegetable garden with a group
of disabled adults. Recently, she was severely criticised by some colleagues for
using ‘children’s songs’ as a ‘warm-up’ activity during one of the singing groups
she leads as part of her job. Among other things, her colleagues told her that to use
such songs was wrong, because they were not ‘age appropriate.’ We were surprised
by Jan’s story. She loves her work and is well thought of by her colleagues.
However, those who admonished her clearly hold the view that to use what they
think of as ‘children’s songs’ with disabled adults is necessarily to demean or
infantilise them. We believe that Jan’s colleagues jumped too hastily to their
negative conclusion. In this chapter, we will explain why we believe this; say a
little about some problems that arise for those who work with adults who have
learning disabilities, in caring for and supporting them in ways that enable them to
flourish as people, and critique the unthinking application of the concept of ‘age
appropriateness.’ Finally we will say a little about the way in which Jan’s
colleagues shared their views of her use of children’s songs.
Key Words: Learning disability/learning difficulties, children’s songs, respect,

demeaning behaviour.
*****
1. Jan’s Story
A few months ago we received a phone call from a young friend who wanted to
talk about an upsetting incident in her workplace. Jan works with adults who have
learning disabilities. She loves her work and is well thought of by her colleagues,
so we were surprised when she told us about having been criticised by two
colleagues for using children’s’ songs in the singing groups she runs as part of her
work. Their criticism had been so unexpected, so direct, and delivered in such an
authoritative way that she had felt unable to question what they had said, even
though she has significantly more knowledge and experience than they have in the
area on which their criticism was focused.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
LIV.
True science finds its own by kindlier quest,
Nor lowers itself to torture’s loathsome test;
Multiplies not the sentient being’s pain,
But makes a keener lens of man’s own brain;
Seeks not by outrage dire a soul to grasp,
Or dimly trace its agonising gasp;
But surer learns what fire that soul may move,
Not wrung with deathly pang, but thrilled by breath of love.
LV.
To touch of love alone will Nature pour
The choicest treasures of her occult store;
Into the ear of love alone repeat
The secret of the song our pulses beat;
To eye of love alone, with joyance bright,
Shows she her form suffused in living light;
To heart that loves her, Nature gives to know
How from Love’s might alone all thoughts of Wisdom grow.
LVI.
So opes a vaster knowledge to the view,
Love points the way and woman holds the clue;
Nature on her the trustful office laid,
And arbiter of human fortune made;
With woman honoured, rises man to height,
With her degraded, sinks again in night;
Yet still the wayward race has sluggish been
To learn the fealty due to Earth’s advancing queen.
LVII.
For long, in jealousy for corporal power,
Had man contemned his sister’s worthier dower;
What time his ruder feelings held the sway,
With little hope or hint of truer way;
Till on a wistful world has dawned benign
The prescience of a potency divine
Sleeping, unrecked of, deep in woman’s heart,
Waiting some kiss superne, into full life to start.
LVIII.
Woman’s own soul must seek and find that fay,
And wake it into light of quickening day;
Man’s counsel helpful in that track shall be
For all his learning rich return and fee;
His philosophic and chirurgic lore,
To her imparted, swell her innate store;
Till, clothed with majesty of mind she stand,
Regent of Nature’s will, in heart, and head, and hand.
LIX.
Each sequent life shall feel her finer care,
Each heir of life a wealthier bounty share;
Those lives allied in equal union chaste
A sweeter purpose, purer rapture, taste;
Both parents vindicate the duteous name,
The troth and kinship of their linked claim;
The only rivalry that moves their mind,
How for their lineage fair still larger fate to find.
LX.
Their task ineffable yields wondrous gain,
Their energies celestial force attain;
Their intermingled souls, with passion dight,
In aspiration soar past earthly height;
Nor fades their prospect into void again,—
Woman has gift the vision to retain,
And mould their dreams of love, with conscious skill,
To human living types supreme of form and will.
LXI.
The psychic and the physical at one
In fervid vigour through their frame shall run;
Their science leaps the bounds of straiter space,
Whose crude dimensions curbed their growing grace;
Whose inefficiencies allowed not verge
For rich research their lofty souls would urge;
To them the keys of life and love are given,—
The love that lifts the life from rank of earth to heaven.
LXII.
And “winged words on which the soul would pierce
Into the height of love’s rare Universe”
Shall native flow from them as mother tongue
In softest strain to listening infant sung;
Till, the sad memories of unmeant wrong
Solving in music of conciliant song,
Man’s destiny with woman’s blended be
In one sublime progression,—full, and strong, and free.
LXIII.
L’Envoi.
The bard of yore, the stately Florentine,—

The seer of the dream men named Divine,—
Through whose grave tones one strenuous passion rolled,
While to slow ears the voice fell stern or cold,—
In his last verse proclaimed his crowning faith,
By words whose echoes pass the bar of death;—
As breathed his soul with Beatrice afar—
“The love that moves the sun and every circling star.”
WOMAN FREE.
NOTES, &c.
I.
2.—“Science calm moves ...”
“Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a

charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with
mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”—George Eliot
(“Middlemarch,” Chap. LXXIII.)
3.—“Research and reason ...”
As indicated by Professor Oliver T. Lodge, “It is but a platitude to

say that our clear and conscious aim should always be truth, and that
no lower or meaner standard should ever be allowed to obtrude itself
before us. Our ancestors fought hard and suffered much for the
privilege of free and open inquiry, for the right of conducting
investigation untrammelled by prejudice and foregone conclusions,
and they were ready to examine into any phenomenon which
presented itself.... Fear of avowing interest or of examining into
unorthodox facts is, I venture to say, not in accordance with the
highest traditions of the scientific attitude.”—(Address as President
of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association,
1891.)
See also the words of Richard Jefferies:—“Research proceeds upon
the same old lines and runs in the ancient grooves.... But there
should be no limit placed on the mind.... Most injurious of all is the
continuous circling on the same path, and it is from this that I wish
to free my mind.”—(“The Story of My Heart,” Chap. X.)
5.—“... part revealed.”
“We are still the early settlers in a beautiful world, whose

capabilities, imperfectly known as yet, wait until higher
developments of man can understand them fully, and apply the
result to the general good.”—Professor T. Rupert Jones (Address as
President of the Geological Section of the British Association, 1891).
II.
3.—“... keener conscience ...”
“C’est l’incarnation de l’idée qui se dresse tout à coup en face des

vieilles traditions obstinées et insuffisantes et elle vient ... poser sa
revendication personelle et nécessaire contre les lois jadis
excellentes, mais qui, les mœurs s’étant modifiées, apparaissent
subitement comme des injustices et des barbaries.”—A. Dumas fils
(“Les Femmes qui Tuent et les Femmes qui Votent,” p. 25).
IV.
7.—“... monitor’s still voice.”—Conf. Wordsworth;

“Taught both by what she” (Nature) “shows, and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
(“Hart-Leap Well.”)
VI.
1.—“... prehistoric hour.”
“The preface of general history must be compiled from the

materials presented by barbarism. Happily, if we may say so, these
materials are abundant. So unequally has the species been
developed, that almost every conceivable phase of progress may be
studied, as somewhere observed and recorded. And thus the
philosopher, fenced from mistake as to the order of development, by
the inter-connection of the stages and their shadings into one
another by gentle gradations, may draw a clear and decided outline
of the course of human progress in times long antecedent to those to
which even philology can make reference.”—M’Lennan (“Primitive
Marriage,” p. 9)....
Id.... “I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all
parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to
establish that, in primitive societies, woman, being held in very low
esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic
animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master
can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices
there is nothing which approaches even distantly to marriage, and
we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes
marriages.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. VI.).
2.—“... woman thrall ...”
“Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman
was a slave before the slave existed.”—August Bebel (“Woman,”
Chap. I.).
Id.... “From the very earliest twilight of human society, every
woman (owing to the value attached to her by man, combined with
her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage
to some man.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Woman,” Chap. I.).
Id.... “In every country, and in every time, woman, organically
weaker than man, has been more or less enslaved by him.”—
Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XI.).
Id....
“It raised up the humble and fallen, gave spirit and strength to the poor,
And is freeing from slavery Woman, the slave of all ages gone by.”
—C. G. Leland (“The Return of the Gods”).
3.—“... heinous skill.”
“It is pitiful to reflect that man’s vaunted superiority over the

brute, the greater activity of his brain, and the subtler cunning of his
hand, have for so long lent themselves to the oppression that has
resulted in such pernicious consequences, and in the still existent
slavery, social and physical, of the female of his own species.”—Ben
Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).
8.—“... soulless gloom.”
Compare the following picture of the somewhat parallel condition

of a lower race at the present time:—
“Natives may well call the monkey sire Maharaja, for he is the very type and
incarnation of savage and sensual despotism. They are right, too, in making their
Hanuman red, for the old male’s face is of the dusky red you see in some elderly,
overfed human faces. Like human Maharajas, they have their tragedies and
mayhap their romances. One morning there came a monkey chieftain, weak and
limping, having evidently been worsted in a severe fight with another of his own
kind. One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes bore terrible traces of battle, and
he hirpled slowly along with a pathetic air of suffering, supporting himself on the
shoulder of a female, a wife, the only member of his clan who had remained
faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them bread and raisins, and the wounded
warrior carefully stowed the greater part away in his cheek pouch. The faithful
wife, seeing her opportunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound hand, and,
opening his mouth, she deftly scooped out the store of raisins. Then she sat and ate
them very calmly at a safe distance, while he mowed and chattered in impotent
rage. He knew that without her help he could not reach home, and was fain to wait
with what patience he might till the raisins were finished. It was a sad sight, but,
like more sad sights, touched with the light of comedy. This was probably her first
chance of disobedience or of self-assertion in her whole life, and I am afraid she
thoroughly enjoyed it. Then she led him away.”—J. Lockwood Kipling (“Beast and
Man in India”).
VII.
1.—“... Evolution ...”
“We now know that Nature, as an anthropomorphic being, does

not exist; that the great forces called natural are unconscious; that
their blind action results, however, in the world of life, in a choice, a
selection, a progressive evolution, or, to sum up, in the survival of the
individuals best adapted to the conditions of their existence.”—
Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. I., Part II.).
Id.... “Robert Chambers’s common-sense view of evolution as a
process of continued growing.”—Professor Patrick Geddes and J.
Arthur Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” p. 302).
3.—“By Art ...”
“Other implements of Palæolithic age are formed of bone and

horn. Among these are harpoon-heads, barbed on one or both sides,
awls, pins, and needles with well-formed eyes. But by far the most
noteworthy objects of this class are the fragments of bone, horn,
ivory, and stone, which exhibit outlined and even shaded sketches of
various animals. These engravings have been made with a sharp-
pointed implement, and are often wonderfully characteristic
representations of the creatures they pourtray. The figures are
sometimes single, in other cases they are drawn in groups. We find
representations of a fish, a seal, an ibex, the red-deer, the great Irish
elk or deer, the bison, the horse, the cave-bear, the reindeer, and the
mammoth or woolly elephant. Besides engravings, we meet also with
sculptures.... It is impossible to say to what use all these objects were
put. Some of them may have been handles for knives, while others
are mere fragments, and only vague guesses can be made as to the
nature of the original implements. It is highly probable, however,
that many of these works of art may have been designed simply as
such, for the pleasure and amusement of the draughtsman and his
fellows.”—James Geikie (“Prehistoric Europe,” Chap. II.).
Id.... The culture or appreciation of Art is of itself evidence of a
higher nature in man; “a soul, a psyche, a something which aspires,”
as Richard Jefferies calls it. For though the professional pursuit of
Art may be occasionally not unmingled with mercenary motives, or
with the pourtrayal of incentives to lower desire, yet the ultimate
appeal of every truly beautiful picture or object of Art is, at any rate,
not to man’s mercenary or meaner nature. As Jefferies again says,
“The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. The soul is the
higher even by gazing on beauty.”—(“The Story of My Heart,” Chap.
VII.)
7.—“... the soul ...”
“The mind of man is infinite. Beyond this, man has a soul. I do not
use this word in the common-sense which circumstances have given
to it. I use it as the only term to express that inner consciousness
which aspires.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” Chap.
IX.).
8.—“... from lower flush of lust.”
“The fact to be insisted upon is this, that the vague sexual

attraction of the lowest organisms has been evolved into a definite
reproductive impulse, into a desire often predominating over even
that of self-preservation; that this, again, enhanced by more and
more subtle additions, passes by a gentle gradient into the love of the
highest animals, and of the average human individual.”—Geddes and
Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).
VIII.
5, 6.—“The voice erst roused by hunger or by rage,

Now tells the nobler passions of the age.”
“The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when, with his varied

tones and cadences, he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers,
little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely
remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent
passions during their mutual courtship and rivalry.”—Darwin (“The
Descent of Man,” Chap. XIX.).
7.—“... with love’s language is uplifted love.”
Language is thought, we are told; so also is love. And thus the

reciprocal and cumulative action of love, thought, and language
stands a corollary to Max Müller’s words:—“Language and thought
are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts
without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to
think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.”—(“Science of
Language,” Lect. IX.)
Id.... “Even the rude Australian girl (aborigine) sings in a strain of
romantic affliction:
‘I shall never see my darling again.’”
—Westermarck (“History of Human Marriage,” p. 503).

Id.... “And again, another benefit accrues to the race from
marriages of affection. Do not your ancient epics which sing of love
sing also of noble deeds and acts of heroism on the part both of men
and women, actuated by a pure affection for each other? Alike in
your dramas and in those of Shakespeare, and of all great writers,
love is the great motive power which impels to deeds of prowess, the
spring of noble actions, of unselfish devotion, of words and thoughts
which have enriched all later generations, the one sentiment which

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