Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks ...shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. The book draws on a wealth of primary sources including court records and campaign documents and encompassing interviews with more than sixty activists and legal experts. While showing that the disability rights movement has had a significant impact on equality jurisprudence in two countries, the book also demonstrates that the act of mobilizing rights can have consequences, both intended and unintended, for social movements themselves.
No Right to Be Idle Rose, Sarah F
2017, 2017-02-13, 2017-09-21, 2017-04-03
eBook
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they ...were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.
Never before have the civil rights of people with disabilities aligned so well with developments in information and communication technology. The center of the technology revolution is the Internet's ...World Wide Web, which fosters unprecedented opportunities for engagement in democratic society. The Americans with Disabilities Act likewise is helping to ensure equal participation in society by people with disabilities. Globally, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities further affirms that persons with disabilities are entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of fundamental personal freedoms. This book is about the lived struggle for disability rights, with a focus on Web equality for people with cognitive disabilities, such as intellectual disabilities, autism, and print-related disabilities. The principles derived from the right to the Web - freedom of speech and individual dignity - are bound to lead toward full and meaningful involvement in society for persons with cognitive and other disabilities.
Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture covers the entire scope of Germany's most tragic and tumultuous century—from the Weimar Republic to the current administration—revealing how central the ...notion of disability is to modern German cultural history. By examining a wide range of literary and visual depictions of disability, Carol Poore explores the contradictions of a nation renowned for its social services programs yet notorious for its history of compulsory sterilization and eugenic dogma. This comprehensive volume focuses particular attention on the horrors of the Nazi era, when those with disabilities were considered "unworthy of life," but also investigates other previously overlooked topics including the exile community's response to disability, socialism and disability in East Germany, current bioethical debates, and the rise and gains of Germany's disability rights movement. Richly illustrated, wide-ranging, and accessible, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture gives all those interested in disability studies, German studies, visual culture, Nazi history, and bioethics the opportunity to explore controversial questions of individuality, normalcy, citizenship, and morality. The book concludes with a memoir of the author's experiences in Germany as a person with a disability.
Disability and Information Technology examines the extent to which regulatory frameworks for information and communication technologies (ICTs) safeguard the rights of persons with disabilities as ...citizenship rights. It adopts a comparative approach focused on four case studies: Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. It focuses on the tension between social and economic values in the regulation of ICTs and calls for a regulatory approach based on a framework of principles that reflects citizenship values. The analysis identifies challenges encountered in the jurisdictions examined and points toward the rights-based approach advanced by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a benchmark in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities to have equal access to information. The research draws on a wealth of resources, including legislation, cases, interviews, consultation documents and responses from organisations representing persons with disabilities.
Disability Hate Crimes Sherry, Mark
2010, 20160523, 2016-05-23, 2010-06-01, 20100101
eBook
Disability hate crimes are a global problem. They are often violent and hyper-aggressive, with life-changing effects on victims, and they send consistent messages of intolerance and bigotry. This ...ground-breaking book shows that disability hate crimes do exist, that they have unique characteristics which distinguish them from other hate crimes, and that more effective policies and practices can and must be developed to respond and prevent them. With particular focus on the UK and USA's contrasting response to this issue, this book will help readers to define hate crimes as well as place them within their wider social context. It discusses the need for legislative recognition and essential improvements on the reporting of incidents and assistance for individual victims of these crimes, as well as the need to address the social exclusion of disabled people and the negative attitudes surrounding their condition.
How can we learn to notice the signs of disability? We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped “deaf person in area” road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or ...white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived due to a process she terms “dis-attention.” To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize phenomena—including disability. By adding perception to the understanding of disability’s materialization, Kerschbaum significantly expands our understanding of disability, accounting for its fluctuations and transformations in the semiotics of everyday life. Drawing on a set of thirty-three research interviews focused on disabled faculty members’ experiences with disability disclosure, as well as written narratives by disabled people, this book argues for the materiality of narrative, suggesting narratives as a means by which people enact boundaries around phenomena and determine their properties. Signs of Disability offers strategies and practices for challenging problematic and pervasive forms of “dis-attention” and proposes a new theoretical model for understanding disability in social, rhetorical, and material settings.
The onslaught of neoliberalism, austerity measures and cuts, impact of climate change, protracted conflicts and ongoing refugee crisis, rise of far right and populist movements have all negatively ...impacted on disability. Yet, disabled people and their allies are fighting back and we urgently need to understand how, where and what they are doing, what they feel their challenges are and what their future needs will be.
This comprehensive handbook emphasizes the importance of everyday disability activism and how activists across the world bring together a wide range of activism tactics and strategies. It also challenges the activist movements, transnational and emancipatory politics, as well as providing future directions for disability activism.
With contributions from senior and emerging disability activists, academics, students and practitioners from around the globe, this handbook covers the following broad themes:
Contextualising disability activism in global activism
Neoliberalism and austerity in the global North
Rights, embodied resistance and disability activism
Belonging, identity and values: how to create diverse coalitions for rights
Reclaiming social positions, places and spaces
Social media, support and activism
Campus activism in higher education
Inclusive pedagogies, evidence and activist practices
Enabling human rights and policy
Challenges facing disability activism
The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism provides disability activists, students, academics, practitioners, development partners and policy makers with an authoritative framework for disability activism.
The social position of learning disabled people has shifted rapidly over the last 20 years, from long-stay institutions, first into community homes and day centres, and now to a currently emerging ...goal of ""ordinary lives"" for individuals using person-centred support and personal budgets. These approaches promise to replace a century and a half of ""scientific"" pathological models based on expert assessment, and of the accompanying segregated social administration which determined how and where people led their lives, and who they were. This innovative volume explains how concepts of learning disability, intellectual disability and autism first came about, describes their more recent evolution in the formal disciplines of psychology, and shows the direct relevance of this historical knowledge to present and future policy, practice and research. Goodey argues that learning disability is not a historically stable category and different people are considered ""learning disabled"" as it changes over time. Using psychological and anthropological theory, he identifies the deeper lying pathology as ""inclusion phobia"", in which the tendency of human societies to establish an in-group and to assign out-groups reaches an extreme point. Thus the disability we call ""intellectual"" is a concept essential only to an era in which to be human is essentially to be deemed intelligent, autonomous and capable of rational choice. Interweaving the author's historical scholarship with his practice-based experience in the field, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia challenges myths about the past as well as about present-day concepts, exposing both the historical continuities and the radical discontinuities in thinking about learning disability.
Ableism and assistive technology Berntsen, Leslie
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
09/2023, Volume:
381, Issue:
6662
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Harmful tropes can lead to misguided assumptions when designing devices for people with disabilities
