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The social model of disability: Europe and the majority world
- Editors:
- BARNES Colin, MERCER Geof, eds.
- Publisher:
- Disability Press
- Publication year:
- 2005
- Pagination:
- 218p.
- Place of publication:
- Leeds
Over the last three decades disability activists and writers have advocated the social model of disability as a comprehensive critique of orthodox academic and administrative approaches to the understanding and development of social policy for disabled people. This book contains thirteen chapters on the application of social model inspired thinking outside Britain. Contributors include academics, activists and practitioners. They raise several important issues and concerns central to theorising and applying social model insights to 'developed' and majority world countries. Examples include emerging debates within the European Union, including transport, law and citizenship, with case studies of France, Sweden and Disabled Peoples' International. Focus on the majority world covers human rights and development strategies, user led initiatives and community based rehabilitation with case studies of Bangladesh and Egypt.
Students with disabilities, learning difficulties and disadvantages: statistics and indicators
- Author:
- ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
- Publisher:
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
- Publication year:
- 2005
- Pagination:
- 150p.
- Place of publication:
- Paris
Personal assistance: direct payments or alternative public service: does it matter for the promotion of user control?
- Author:
- ASKHEIM Ole Petter
- Journal article citation:
- Disability and Society, 20(3), May 2005, pp.247-260.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
Personal assistance organised as direct payments is seen as an important means for securing user control and freeing disabled people from their reliance on welfare professionals and unpaid carers. The hypothesis put forward in the article is that just looking at whether personal assistance is organised as direct payments or as an alternative service represents an overly restricted approach to judge how the user’s preferences are taken care of. By comparing models of personal assistance in the US, the UK, Sweden and Norway it will show that several other factors influence user control. In the final part of the article the question is raised as to whether paternalism is always negative for welfare service users. Since the users constitute a broad group it might be questioned if the assumption of the service users as rational, well informed and competent to make the best choices is always valid.
Welfare to work in practice: social security and participation in economic and social life
- Editors:
- SAUNDERS Peter, (ed.)
- Publisher:
- Ashgate
- Publication year:
- 2005
- Pagination:
- 261p.
- Place of publication:
- Aldershot
This book brings together some of the leading experts to discuss the rationale for welfare to work policies, their limitations and problems encountered in practice. Contributors address topics ranging from the linkages between social security and the labour market to how the welfare to work agenda is responding to the needs of special groups such as lone parents, the long-term unemployed and those with a disability. The book puts the arguments and ideas that underlie the new welfare reform agenda under the microscope and explains how it is being implemented in an international context. Several new data sets are analyzed in a collection that covers developments in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Norway, the UK and the US, as well as several comparative studies. In doing so, this volume helps to bridge the gap between research and policy and demonstrates how policy can respond to the challenges it faces.
No wheelchairs beyond this point: a historical examination of wheelchair access in the Twentieth Century in Britain and America
- Authors:
- WATSON Nick, WOODS Brian
- Journal article citation:
- Social Policy and Society, 4(1), January 2005, pp.97-105.
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
On the surface, the wheelchair appears a simple machine: its function seemingly apparent and its workings relatively uncomplicated. Yet, despite this apparent simplicity, the wheelchair is a complex artefact imbued with a myriad of social as well as technical relations that act simultaneously to exclude and include, confine and liberate, shape and be shaped. The wheelchair's inextricable links to injury and illness have certainly shaped its definition as a medical device. Such a definition has labelled the occupier as passive or ill and shaped a wider understanding of the machine as a prison. Wheelchair users, however, perceive the machine as a means to independence: it enables rather than disables. We present evidence here to suggest that this is not a recent phenomenon as we show how wheelchair access has been on the political agenda for disabled people for most of the twentieth century. The paper also examines the role of the wheelchair in the development of this movement, and we suggest that, as the design of the wheelchair improved, so the demand for better access increased. The final section of the paper looks at how poorly the state and its agents understood the issue of access.