Disability Rights and Disability Studies in Social Work:

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the concern of social work to intervene at the points where citizens, including disabled people, interact with their environments, communities and societies while promoting principles of human rights and social justice. We aim at a cross-fertilisation of ideas emerging in social policy and social work, inspired by the interdisciplinary perspective of critical disability studies. This implies a productive venture insofar as social work has long sought to embrace its explicit social agenda as a practice that does not distance itself from historical, social, political and cultural processes and social policies in welfare state contexts that influence the well-being of citizens (Lorenz 2006). Influenced by disability studies and disability activism, the language of rights has acquired symbolic potential in Europe and has been linked to wider concerns about citizenship, since the notions of rights and citizenship “are increasingly invoked as both the basis of disabled people’s claims to support and services” (Stainton 2002: 252). There is, however, reason for caution since the rhetoric of disability rights can entail complexity in practice, reflecting the exclusionary tensions and contradictions of citizenship (Lister 1997). Citizenship refers conventionally to the ways in which the relationship between the individual and the state is constructed. But within the context of layered relations of power, it may be constructed in different ways (Biesta, De Bie & Wildemeersch 2013). Notions of citizenship are shaped in historical context through dialectical tensions between the competing principles that have been the drivers of all social struggles and political developments across Europe. Modern constitutional nation states provided a concept of citizenship based on the rule of law and liberal democracy, rooted in Western enlightenment ideals and implying a blindness to social inequalities. Subsequent attempts to fine-tune social rights after the second World War extended the principle of democratic participation in welfare states to those who had been politically excluded subjects without power or property (Offe 1984). The principles of universal equality and recognition of all citizens makes possible a configuration of the welfare state in which solidaristic relations of interdependency could be a constitutive element of citizenship and human rights (Raes 2003; Dean 2010). Our contribution is inspired by critical disability studies, which reminds us of the frailty of particular citizen subjects in our societies, since we “start with disability but never end with it: disability is the space from which to think through a host of political, theoretical and practical issues that are relevant to all” (Goodley, Hughes & Davis 2012: 3). More particularly, our chapter revolves around the rights and citizenship of people with ‘learning disabilities’ . Although formally recognized as citizens, they have perennially faced the risk of being denied recognition and respect. This obliges us to consider just how to realise the potential of an inclusive citizenship (Lister 2007). Turner (1993: 507) has stressed that “it is from a collectively held recognition of individual frailty that rights as a system of mutual protection gain their emotive force”. Therefore, we develop recent ideas about the relationship between needs and rights (Dean 2010, 2013), and explore the ways in which underlying notions of the human subject can be constituted through social work practices. In that sense, we argue for encompassing notions of entitlement, whereby substantive rights are negotiated by disabled people through social workers on terms that embrace the complexity of their needs and the reality of human interdependency. This chapter is divided into three sections. First, we broadly discuss historically rooted welfare state transformations while focusing more particularly on developments and changes within the field of social work and social care for people with learning disabilities in the UK and Belgium. Second, we reveal how rights may be constituted through the naming and claiming of complex needs and concerns when they are negotiated and claimed by people with learning disabilities and social work professionals, and we illustrate emerging contradictions and competing interpretations of complex needs in current social work practices. Third, we address challenges and possible principles for social work.