ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the use of biographical accounts in the lives of people with profound learning difficulties. There have been rapid changes over the past twenty years in the provision of care in Britain with the movement of people from long-term care in hospital to community-based living. The 1981 ‘Care in the Community’ (DHSS 1981) played a large part in bringing about this change which also resulted in an eventual shift in control from health to local authority. Between 1980 and 1986 there was a large increase in the number of people with learning difficulties who were relocated from hospital to the community (Booth et al. 1989). Much of the research examining the impact of these changes has focused on people who are more able and can communicate their needs. However, people with profound learning difficulties are not able to represent in any direct way their own understanding of their life and their position within the care settings in which they live. We examine the way biographical accounts in the form of life story work can be used to establish continuities in the experience of people with profound learning difficulties when they are moved from hospital to community-based care. Our concern is the way that carers attend to issues of identity in their relationships with people who are unable to speak on their own behalf. We discuss how the construction of life story books contributes to the way identities are accomplished and made visible as social acts of remembering. We are interested in how social practices of remembering provide continuities of identities across changes in the provision of care from a hospital to a community base. We discuss how these identities are realised in terms of continuities of participation in the social practices that make up the conditions of living of the people who are the recipients of care and the working practices of those who provide it.
