On the Spectrum: Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability and Belonging in Britain and America

FAIN: FEL-295057-24

Katherine Elizabeth Sorrels, PhD
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH 45220-2872)

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of the Camphill School movement and its role in the international disability rights movement.

My proposal is for a book on a network of intentional communities for intellectually disabled children and adults called Camphill. It was founded by doctors who fled Nazi Austria for Scotland, and it soon grew into an international movement due in part to the way its founders subverted norms in disability care: they integrated disabled people into their own family households and stressed communal learning, work, and social life. This approach, while popular with parents of disabled people, was suspect among mainstream medical professionals and state overseers. Conflict ensued, with disabled people caught in the middle. Based on oral history interviews and extensive archival research, I reconstruct the movement’s history and its entanglements with some of the twentieth century’s defining events and cultural currents, including the Holocaust, mass migrations, the emergence of the counterculture, sectarian rifts in medicine, and the growth of the disabled people’s movement.