The Metanarrative of Learning Disability Owen Barden and Steve Walden NB: This is a draft. For the version of record, and to cite, please refer to Barden, O & Walden, S. (2021) The Metanarrative of Learning Disability. In Bolt, D (Ed), Metanarratives of Disability. Abingdon, Oxon. Routledge: pp77-93 Abstract Over the last two centuries, learning disability has become an organising concept: a concept which has radically transformed our sense of what it means to be - or not be - a person. In this chapter, we employ a historiographic methodology to explore a metanarrative which is so powerful and pervasive that it envelops both people with learning disabilities and people without. We draw on archival evidence, our own perspectives, and those of our learning- disabled co-researchers to illuminate three tropes which persist through the metanarrative: that people with learning disabilities are vulnerable, unworthy, and requiring control. Introduction A metanarrative is a ‘cloud of story’ that displaces personal narratives and knowledges with overarching ones derived from dominant, etic discourses (Bolt, 2014, 2020). It is a globalising or totalising cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience (Stephen and McCallum, 1998). In this chapter we explore the cultural evolution of the metanarrative - specific tropes and stereotypes - associated with what are now frequently termed learning disabilities. Conceptualisations of, and responses to, what we now call learning disabilities have varied dramatically between cultures and across eras. It has been suggested, for example, that the Mexican Olmec tribe considered people with Down’s Syndrome to be the offspring of humans and the main Olmec totem, the jaguar, and so revered them as godlike (Gonzalo & Milton, 1974; Slorach, 2014). Currently, attitudes are much more prejudicial. Contemporary Western culture tends to characterise learning disabled people as vulnerable, unworthy and requiring control. We trace the roots of these conceptualisations as far back as the mid nineteenth century, although of course they go back much further (Barnes, 1997). This was the first period of institutionalisation and