Disability Protests Research Articles

I’m Angry! Disability Protests in Post-Communist Poland

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to analyse the disability protests that took place in Poland in the 2010s in relation to the American tradition of disability protest as a reference point in the global history of disability. The similarity of means and the difference of outcomes between American and Polish protests reveal the role of social, political and economic contexts of post-communist states in the use of disability protest strategies. This paper also explores how the hidden transcript of deaf and disabled resilience was transformed into a public one, reshaping the general public’s mental framework in relation to disability.

The Arab Spring Protests and Concurrent Disability Protests: Social Movement Spillover or Spurious Relationship?

Protests from different social movements sometimes coincide, but does that mean that one movement is influencing the other and increasing its “action mobilization,” or are different sets of factors causing the coincident protests? This paper examines that question in reference to two sets of coincident protests: those of people with disabilities and those of the pro-Democracy protests of 2011. It shows that, although disability protests did not start at the same time as the pro-Democracy protests, a number happened during and after, and in close physical proximity to, those protests. Neither set of protests acknowledged or referred to the other. While it is likely that a new law in Egypt and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities were among the mobilizing factors for people with disabilities, it also appears that the language of “rights” began to diffuse from the pro-Democracy protests to the disability protests.

The Globalization of Disability Protests, 1970-2005: Pushing the Limits of Cross-Cultural Research?

The Globalization of Disability Protests, 1970-2005: Pushing the Limits of Cross-Cultural Research?

The Globalization of Disability Protests, 1970‐2005: Pushing the Limits of Cross-Cultural Research?

AbstractThis paper examines political protests related to disability issues which occurred since 1970. It examines almost 700 protests outside the US and over 1200 within the US. The data come from media reports and organization websites. Results show that US protests increased after 1984 while non-US protests increased substantially after 1989. The largest numbers of non-US protests occurred in the UK and Canada. US protests are proportionally more likely than non-US protests to be cross-disability or to relate to mobility impairments, while outside of the US disability-specific protests, especially those related to blindness and deafness, are more common. American protests are more likely to target governments as opposed to non-governmental targets than were non-US protests. Factors relating to disability as well as methodological limitations are considered in explaining these differences.

Social Movement Diffusion? The Case of Disability Protests in the US and Canada

This paper asks if disability protests in Canada diffused from similar protests in the US or if they sprang up independently. It analyzes 1215 American protests and 177 Canadian protests which occurred between 1970 and 2005. It shows that Canadian protests began later than protests in the US, are more likely than American protests to be impairment-specific, are more likely to have demands in which focus on services as opposed to rights and are more likely to target provincial governments. Explanations include the effect of several notable protest successes and the development of multiple-impairment, single-issue organizations in the American context, and the social structure of disability services at the local or provincial levels in the Canadian context. The paper concludes that Canadian protests did not occur because of American protests or diffuse from them.

Disability Politics in Israel: Civil Society, Advocacy, and Contentious Politics

Until the late 1990s, Israeli legislation had focused largely on the distribution of disability allowances and benefits, rather then on disability rights. Since then, owing largely to the efforts of the Bizchut organization and to two national disability protests in 1999 and 2001, Israeli disability policy and legislation have gradually shifted from a needs-based to a human rights and equality-based platform. Using Beck's (1994) theory of subpolitics, I analyze the emergence of disability rights advocacy and protestation, and their role in bringing about policy and legal changes in Israel. I argue four connected points: that Israeli disability politics demonstrate how civil society actors can advance change: that the activism of these actors, Bizchut and the two protests, is interconnected and mutually empowering; that these events represent the rise of the disability community as a legitimate and active social actor; and that these events constitute an Israeli visibility project and are crucial for advancing both disability rights and needs.

The Implications of Disability Protests for Social Work Practice

This article examines the demands which have been made in the over 800 US protests this author has analyzed. Some demands are cross-disability, meaning they could apply to people with all types of impairments; these include demands for rights and accessibility in all domains. Other demands are disability-specific: they apply to people with specific types of impairments, ranging from mobility impairments to developmental disabilities. Many demands have been related to services, which can be either cross-disability or disability-specific. The paper examines the implications of these demands for social work practice. These include that disability be de-stigmatized by practitioners, that people with disabilities have choices, that they have control over their services, and that all aspects of social work practice be accessible to people with any type of disability.

Society for East Asian Anthropology

I spent the past year in Japan exploring social welfare politics in the context of people with severe physical disabilities. I define “people with severe physical disabilities” here as people with major physical impairments such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy or spinal injury so severe that they cannot cook, bathe, eat, defecate, go to a movie theatre or other activities of daily living without the use of a full-time personal attendant. Methodologically, my work blends political anthropology and visual anthropology in a comparative study of the US and Japan. People with severe disabilities challenge the American liberal notion of equality under the law, which is the basis of much disability rights legislation. In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of disability and calls for “reasonable accommodation” of persons with disabilities. While this benefits those with mild disabilities who require little in the way of accommodation (the median expenditure is a measly $420 per person), people with severe (and even moderate) disabilities fall entirely out of the scope of the ADA due to “undue hardship” on employers. What remains of the ADA has successfully been whittled away by Supreme Court challenges over states rights, sovereignty and a rapidly shrinking definition of disability. Further complicating the situation for people with severe disabilities are the current cutbacks on social security (SSDI/SSI), Medicaid and other public assistance programs. Japanese disability policies can be as paternalistic in the best and worst sense of the word. Article 25 of the Japanese Constitution guarantees the “right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living,” which underlies both disability legislation and welfare policy. People with physical, developmental or psychiatric disabilities are required to register for and carry a shogaishatecho (disability ID card), which gives them a broad array of benefits including a disability welfare pension, public assistance from local governments, free travel on municipal transportation and discounted travel on JR railways. Since 2003, people with severe physical disabilities are also eligible for part-time or full-time personal assistance coverage if they wish to leave their families and nursing homes and live independently. They are facilitated by Centers for Independent Living (CILs) that coordinate personal attendant care. People with disabilities manage the CILs and receive administrative overhead reimbursement from the government for the personal attendant care services they provide to themselves. Activists in Japan reject a negative moral reading of their reliance on welfare funds by arguing that what they do is work. That is, running the CILs and advocating for disability rights is an important part of Japanese civil society, thus they should treat their disability pensions (and the administrative money for the personal care attendants) as their salary, not as a public benefit. “We are not just laying around,” they explained to me, “we are building a new society,” a new Japan. The Japanese government has tried to limit the explosive growth of personal care attendants and in late 2004, declared that they were ending the program. This created a massive response by the CILs who staged a series of large protests in Tokyo, in front of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare building in Kasumigaseki. In confronting the government, Japanese disability advocates have tried to play into the insecurities of the politicians and bureaucrats by showing how far behind Northern European countries Japan is in its disability welfare policies. In response to the protests, the MHLW successfully staged a media blackout by pressuring news and television corporations to withhold coverage of the events. Through this process, I was actively documenting, photographing and blogging the disability protests on my home page (photoethnography.com/blog) and was one of the few (non-mainstream) media sources reporting on the issue. The photograph accompanying this article is from their May 5, 2005, demonstration. Documentary photography has long been associated with exploitation of subjects. Through my photoethnography, I work collaboratively with my informants to produce visual material that accurately reflects their worldview as active agents of social and political change. Since my photography and reportage has subsequently been used in activist magazines and billboards, I am trying to determine the appropriate balance of participant and observer in my fieldwork. When anthropologists blog on breaking events, do we leave the cozy confines of academia and become news reporters? This is an issue that I struggle with on a daily basis when in the field.

Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 (review)

Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 by Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002, 272 pp., casebound, $69.95) IN THE 1970s, deaf people protested outside of telephone companies around the country because they were angry at having to pay for special equipment and spend three times more than hearing people to make long-distance telephone calls containing the same information. To me, these protests seemed to be a demonstration of the shattered hope that the years of massive volunteer effort to achieve telecommunications access would be successful. Emotion can perhaps be a useful form of information to awaken minds and start the gears of litigation and legislation rolling. In 1988, I was living in northern England for six months when the Deaf President Now occurred. I followed it as well as I could from that distance, wishing I could have been there at that historic event. Unknown to many people, stacks of the Blue Book telephone directories, which lists TTY numbers around the country, were provided to the protestors by Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDl) to facilitate rapid communication about the unfolding Week the World Heard Gallaudet. In effect, one political movement seemed to build upon the results of another. Deaf people learned to see farther with demands for social change because we stood on the shoulders of former protesters. I have also often wondered what our world would be like today in terms of both education and employment had the Deaf community a century ago protested the lack of access to the telephone. Visual forms of telephone technologies, including the Telautograph, were known by the Deaf communities in England and the United States in the late-nineteenth century. Indeed, initial excitement about them was evident in these countries' respective Deaf periodicals. Later, deaf people missed a golden opportunity to bring the Electrowriter out of train stations and hotels into their homes and offices until something better came along-the TTY modem. Instead, we waited about ninety years for basic access to long-distance communication, something taken for granted by the hearing society. How our world has changed-or not changed-because of protests in their many forms is a question worthy of research. With these general thoughts in mind, I looked to Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 by Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch as a resource for my home library. The writers used event history analysis to focus on political actions that occurred within the Deaf and disabled communities between 1970 and 1999. The expression protest implies a collective behavior that has been organized in an attempt to change society. Disability Protests provides a good historical introduction. The terminology and concepts associated with disability are well defined, and the authors briefly examine the span from the Colonial period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving the reader a context for the emergence of contentious action among people with disabilities. …

Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970 to 1999

Part and parcel to the civil rights movements of the past thirty years has been a sustained, coordinated effort among Americans to secure equal rights and equal access to that of non-disabled people. Beyond merely providing a history of this movement, Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch's Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970-1999 offers an incisive, sociological analysis of thirty years of protests, organization, and legislative victories within the and populations. The authors begin with a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes contentious politics and what distinguishes a sustained social movement from isolated acts of protest. The numbers of disability rights protests are meticulously catalogued over the course of thirty years, revealing significant increases in both cross-disability actions as well as disability-specific actions. Political rancor within disability communities is addressed as well. Chapter four, A Profile of Contentious Actions confronts the thorny question of who is deaf enough or disabled enough to adequately represent their constituencies. Barnartt and Scotch conclude by giving special attention to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the 1988 Deaf President Now protest, focusing on how these landmark events affected their proponents. Disability Protests offers an entirely original sociological perspective on the emerging movement for and disability rights.

Disability protests: contentious politics, 1970-1999

Disability protests: contentious politics, 1970-1999