H is for Heterotopia Prompts

At a time when utopia feels very far away, how might we embrace heterotopias: worlds within worlds where we can play with ideas of support, control, choice, participation, and professional influence alongside people diagnosed as ‘different’, ‘abnormal’, or even ‘deviant’? Re-read ‘H is for Heterotopia’ and try out one of this week’s prompts. Journal on your own. Bring a prompt to a staff meeting. Use one as a conversation starter with friends, colleagues, and the people you support.

One way to think about heterotopias is as counter sites that question, disrupt, and play with the usual order of things. Unlike utopias, which are purely imagined, heterotopias are real worlds within worlds. Burning Man is a famous example of a world within our world — where the usual playbook for how we live and relate to each other is thrown out and new forms of community emerge. Disney World is another kind of world within worlds.

1. Try making a map of your worlds. The big circle represents the ‘ordered world’ — with all the usual rules and expectations. The smaller circles represent counter sites, where there might be different rules, norms, expectations, and ways of doing or being.

2. What worlds within worlds have you been part of? Where would you position those worlds within worlds? How much are they at the edge, or over the edge?

3. What do you notice about the differences between the big world, and your worlds within worlds? Can’t think of any worlds within worlds that you have been a part of? That’s OK! Are there counter sites you’d like to explore, or that you would want to try? Why?

Professor Miro Griffiths does research with disability self-advocates. He frames the ‘independent living movement’ as an oppositional device — a space to “destabilize assumed truths about support, assistance, choice, control, participation, and professional influence.”

1. Take 10 minutes to free write what you think the assumed truths are about support, assistance, choice, control, participation and professional influence of people with disabilities. Where have and where haven’t those assumptions played out?

2. Don’t want to write? Use this as a conversational prompt in your next staff meeting, check-in, or even at the dinner table! You could ask people: what do people generally assume to be true about what kind of support people with disability need, who is able to exercise choice or control, or what the role of workers and professionals needs to be? When have you found those assumptions to be true versus false?

Professor Miro Griffiths reminds us that “heteretopias are not always liberatory and can emerge to exercise control over populations and identify deviant beings.” For instance, prisons are counter sites designed to exercise control over ‘deviant’ people.

We can look at group homes for people with disabilities or assisted living facilities for older people as counter sites — they are worlds within worlds, with their own rules, norms, and conventions. These residential facilities are regulated in British Columbia under the Community Care and Assisted Living Act.

1. You might scan the Act here. What do you think makes a counter space freeing versus controlling?

2. What in the regulations supports spaces that embrace ‘deviance’ versus control ‘deviance’?

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