Disability, Jewishness, and Belonging: A History of the Camphill Special School Movement in Postwar Britain and America

FAIN: FT-270278-20

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

Research for a book on the history of the Camphill Special Schools movement and its role in the international disability rights movement, including a digital, open-access social network analysis of its founder’s body of work.

My proposal is for a book manuscript and open-access digital project that address the NEH area of interest, Protecting our Cultural Heritage. I trace Jewish pediatricians and disabled children who fled Nazi Vienna for northern Scotland, where they founded an intentional community called Camphill Special School. Camphill soon grew into an international movement for disabled children and adults. Today, there are over 130 Camphill Villages around the world. Camphill’s success is due in part to the way its founders subverted medical norms in disability care: people with disabilities live with their caretakers in family-style households that stress communal learning, work and social life. I argue that Camphill conceived of a new idea of home, one that met a pressing need that neither individual households nor state institutions could meet. Based on oral history interviews and extensive archival research, I reconstruct and contextualize the moment’s history and culture.

Associated Products

Disability and Belonging: Camphill and the Debate over Independent Living for People with Intellectual Disabilities (Web Resource)
Title: Disability and Belonging: Camphill and the Debate over Independent Living for People with Intellectual Disabilities
Author: Katherine Sorrels
Abstract: This StoryMap aims to offer an accessible introduction to the complicated issues at hand in debates about what kinds of living arrangements are ideal for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It is a companion project to my book in progress, On the Spectrum: Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability and Belonging in the UK and US. I focus on the Camphill movement, an international network of residential communities were people and with and without disabilities live together in extended-family style households and work together on the land and in the crafts. Disabled community members are cared for by their non-disabled household members, most of whom choose not to earn an income. Rather than paying them wages, the community provides for their housing, food, and other needs. Camphill’s first community was founded in Scotland in 1939 by refugee physicians from Nazi Austria. They had been trained in Curative Education at the University of Vienna Medical School, one of the research centers from which the autism diagnosis emerged. Today, there are about 140 Camphill and Camphill-inspired communities in Europe, North America, and a few other places around the world. Camphill is championed by some disability self-advocates, allies, and scholars—including Temple Grandin—and strongly criticized by others, which makes it a useful example through which to unpack debates not only about housing, but about disability inclusion and belonging more broadly. I created this project for three reasons: First, to investigate whether there was a spatial dimension to Camphill’s history that would generate insights I might otherwise have missed (there was). Second, to share visual material—images and interactive maps—that are difficult or impossible to include in traditional publications. And third, to communicate the complexity of a fraught topic accessibly, to a broad audience.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://arcg.is/0CrCeH0

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