Discerning personhood through lena-dena: Disability professionals, ethics, and communication

This article looks at practices of discernment in disability spaces in India by analyzing (hierarchical) relational contexts in which disability professionals and disabled people in India interact. We argue that discernment, which we explore through lena-dena (giving and taking), allows us to analyze the ethical stakes of processes of communication, interpreting, and facilitation. Vaidya analyzes how special educators make broad discernments about intellectually disabled people by interpreting their unconventional and nonlinguistic communicative cues. In contrast, Friedner examines how speech and language therapists that work with deaf children make narrow discernments regarding what counts as language and perform the labor of training deaf children to communicate in the normatively correct way—that is, using speech. While disability professionals produce specific kinds of personhood for disabled people through their practices of discernment, they also end up discerning themselves in the process as professionals with difficult yet rewarding jobs. We conclude by discussing a program for individuals with intellectual disabilities where both authors conducted ethnographic research wherein disability professionals discerned disabled people as having social needs and desires on par with nondisabled people and created enabling environments, scaffolded activities, and facilitated conversations to produce and enable complex personhood for them.