ABSTRACT
This chapter provides promising avenues for negotiating recognition and accommodations, as well as interacting across cognitive difference to realize the equal moral worth of people with intellectual disabilities. It explores influential ideas and some of the limited empirical research they have spawned and consider implications for social work practice. Recognizing implications of cognitive impairment on life experiences and on how people learn, their capacity to understand ideas or language, make choices and judgements and manage social relationships and tasks of everyday living is important to all aspects of social work practice. Interpretations of Article 12 suggest it breaks a connection between mental capacity and legal capacity – asserting the ‘right to have rights’ and make decisions about one’s life regardless of cognitive ability. New ideas about inclusion take far greater account of cognitive difference and potential for inclusion in multiple and different communities. The chapter provides a glimpse of ideas influencing social work practice with adults with intellectual disabilities.
