The Purpose of Exploration is to Arrive Back Where We Started and Know it for the First Time

This final chapter articulates and coalesces ideas about different futures and possibilities for people with intellectual disability and their carers that have been explored throughout the book. It summarises the need to notice recurring problems that are met with the same response, when a new one is needed if the matter is to be more adequately addressed. It raised consciousness by noticing the pervasiveness of neoliberal individualism, and the sterility of binaries, interventions and tropes that have been deployed for decades. Acknowledging that much thinking and policy in intellectual disability has changed lives for the better, we have argued that ‘trying harder’ in the entrenched present is not the way forward. Our intention is not to overturn the present assumptive world just to impose a new orthodoxy, but to enter a new period characterised by creativity and experimentation. We bracket matters that are unlikely to change in the short term, to focus on creating and building the alternatives.