Navigating the Asylum: Agency, Emotions and Experience, 1870-1948

My current doctoral research examines how children and young adults, considered to have moderate to severe learning disabilities, navigated both British institutional settings and the wider world between 1870-1948. Despite the considerable scholarship on asylums, there are a limited number of studies which focus on learning disabilities and the specialised idiot institutions established for the care of children in the late nineteenth century (Barrett, 1986; Gladstone, 1996; Wright, 1996; 2001; Dale, 2007). These studies focus on administrative accounts, based on reception orders and admission registers, have meant that institutional discharge and life histories beyond the asylum have been overlooked. Thus, while offering valuable insights into the ways these emerging institutions restricted patients' lives, these studies often still define patients with learning disabilities during this period purely as objects of segregation policies. Therefore, my current work restores agency to those who were confined due to learning disabilities and challenges dominant views and stereotypes about people with learning disabilities. To extend our knowledge beyond the static moments in time recorded in medical case books, the current project places the focus back on individual life-course histories by utilising a previously unused collection from the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster, the key institution for the care of children and young adults with learning disabilities in the north of England.