Articulations of an Institution: Attending to Disability Narrated as a Dangerous Site of Emergency

Abstract

Tip sheets represent a genre of text that take a communicative orientation. As an ordinary form of engagement, tip sheets produced by institutions of police represent and are constituted by taken-for-granted communicative norms that mark policing as the solution to “problem” people. Guided by interpretive disability studies and critical phenomenology, this article orchestrates an encounter with a Toronto Police Service (TPS) tip sheet. A careful analysis of the communicative moves in the text reveals the articulations of an institution, that is the processes by which readers are expected to partake, without question, in a story of disability as a dangerous site of emergency. Attending to how the TPS articulates ways to deal with its problem of disability through blanket nomenclature, binary-communication, and the norm of cooperation, the white colonial project of policing and its method of communicating ‘policing-as-help’ becomes a site of inquiry and an occasion for enacting pause.