Justice For People Research Articles

Conceptualizing restorative justice for people with mental illnesses leaving prison or jail.

Individuals with psychiatric disabilities who are involved in the criminal justice system face a number of challenges to community integration upon release. There is a critical need to develop and evaluate interventions for these individuals that connect them to the community by enhancing naturalistic social connections and helping them to participate meaningfully in valued roles. The purposes of this article are to describe, provide a theoretical rationale, and propose a conceptual model for the use of a particular restorative justice model, circles of support and accountability, to meet this need. We describe the principles of restorative justice (repairing harm, stakeholder involvement, and the transformation of community and governmental roles and relationships) and how these map on to elements of the circles intervention. These elements include a focus on community participation, positive social support, democratic decision making, collective ownership of crime problems, and connection to community-based resources. We then suggest how changes in identity transformation, moral development and motivation, and collective efficacy might mediate relationships between these intervention elements and community integration outcomes. Finally, we encourage the systematic evaluation of the circles intervention for people with mental health conditions leaving custody and provide recommendations for policy and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Fornäs, Johan Europe Faces Europe: Narratives from Its Eastern Half (review)

SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 594 from here’; ‘Wałłbrzych is simply extermination’ (p. 102). Rakowski reads complaints about danger as being important for the expression of grief, rather than their carrying the hope that any kind of dialogue will ensue. The desire to engage in open aggressive action he interprets as a public demonstration of the diggers’ and scrap collectors’ externalized sense of shame. Protest is futile — ‘The social world is deaf to all their complaints and dismay’ (p. 107, original emphasis). The diggers, the scrap collectors, the gatherers, Rakowski concludes, ‘all indirectly speak of their attempts to understand a world that cannot be understood’ (p. 111). Finally, Rakowski presents an analysis of change in a deprived area in the environs of Bełchatów Brown Coal Mine. When brown coal reserves were discovered under Bełchatów in the 1970s, the area underwent rapid development, adversely affecting surrounding villages. The members of the households in Szamów, the settlement at the centre of the study in this area, collect scrap, post-industrial bits and pieces; they also forage in the forests and poach the game that lives on the local spoil heap. The home thus seems to Rakowski ‘to move outwards’, overlapping with the world outside (p. 215), which he compares with the pre-Neolithic hunter/gatherer reality of being in the environment, whereas here, the hunter/gatherer’s skill is transferred to managing post-industrial, ready-made resources. Rakowski presents his anthropological study as ‘an attempt to describe’. He tries to see a world beneath the surface to which Merleau-Ponty refers as the ‘practically imperceptible’. This is a study of social powerlessness, in which the sense of ‘what is real’ has been lost. It is, as Rokowski demonstrates, a critical moment when people are asking questions, when it is unclear to them what they should make of themselves. Nevertheless, Rakowski does not see his respondents as reduced by their circumstances, but discerns an internal dynamic, an ‘inner courage’. This is what it has taken for his subjects to make the huge effort required to hold their lives together and adapt in the face of catastrophe. Rakowski’s study does these people justice, and represents a significant intellectual achievement. Homerton College Peggy Watson University of Cambridge Fornäs, Johan (ed.). Europe Faces Europe: Narratives from Its Eastern Half. Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, IL, 2017. vii + 252 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $52.00: £39.00 (paperback). The narratives of collective identity with which members of Central and East European nations construct their own national identities in relation to REVIEWS 595 ‘Europe’ are, in Slavonic and East European studies, an old question which always has the potential to produce new answers. Indeed, if one agrees with Johan Fornäs and the five other contributors to this volume that narratives do not just reflect but constitute identity, they are perhaps the very question which has given the discipline a reason to exist: the study of ‘Eastern Europe’, and its cognate regions has so often been preoccupied with asking how its borders have been delimited and how it relates to the other understandings of the ‘Europe’ it sits within or alongside, especially since the postcolonial turn of the early 1990s. The ‘East European narratives of Europe’ (p. 13) that Fornäs and his team set out to research in 2012–14 predominantly come from the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine. The question of how East European voices have narrated their desired and perceived relationships to ‘Europe’, conscious of the peripheral status that voices at the structural ‘centre’ of Europe have ascribed them, has been tackled before; but the fast-changing geopolitics of the region nevertheless allow this volume to make a fresh contribution, both in ways the authors would have anticipated and also in ways they could not. The ‘Europe’ that Fornäs and his contributors would have expected to observe being narrated at the beginning of their research was firstly a Europe that had supposedly been symbolically enlarged over the past decade, with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland all among the post-socialist states that joined the European Union in 2004; it was also a ‘Europe’ where many of...

Beyond equality and inequality in education: Bakhtinian dialogic ethics approach of human uniqueness to educational justice

In our essay, we challenge the hegemonic Kantian discourse of defining justice as equality (in a broader sense) and injustice as inequality in education (and elsewhere). We argue that this discourse is based on the underlining assumption of replaceability and measurement of people and of educational practice itself. In contrast, we argue that people and their education are unique. Thus, it is necessary to develop an alternative notion of justice based on uniqueness and immeasurability of people and their education. We found that Bakhtin’s dialogic ethics framework is helpful for developing such an alternative approach. According to the Bakhtinian dialogic ethics, people are engaged in self-contradictory deeds, charged with ethical tensions. These ethically problematic deeds must be challenged by others and the self in critical dialogue and must demand responses by the authors of the deeds striving to achieve justice. Taking responsibility is not merely a discursive process of answering – it is not “answerability” – but rather another ethic deed of defining ethically good or bad, defining quality and values, accepting blame, standing grounds, committing to fixing negative consequences, emotional sympathy, and so on. The process of challenging people’s deeds in critical dialogue and their taking (or not taking) responsibility defines (in)justice of people’s deeds. We examine two cases of educational injustice based on the Bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework of uniquness. We try to show that education and its justice are essentially authorial and, thus, unique processes. Even when justice involves measurable things like money, it is still about unique people with unique educational goals, interests, and needs in unique circumstances that these measurable resources afford. We consider a case of allocation of measurable resources as a compromise between the Kantian formulistic and the Bakhtinian dialogic ethics approaches. We conclude our essay with developing a vision for a just educational practice based on students’ academic freedoms for authorial education.

Building Coalitions with NGOs: Religion Scholars and Disability Justice Activism

The World Council of Churches (WCC), an organization of 348 member churches, is a model of coalition building particularly through its support of individuals, churches, and their ministries for the inclusion, participation, and contributions of people with disabilities in its ecumenical work. The Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network (EDAN) informs one of the initiatives of the WCC—faith in Jesus Christ and communion fellowship—in the journey toward visible unity and justice for people who were too often missing the banquet of a church of all and for all. EDAN and other international disability advocates have most recently embedded its agenda of inclusion into the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations explicitly recognizes the Human Rights for persons with disabilities and, with the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), has raised protections against discrimination, exploitation, and abuse of people with disabilities to the level of international law. The World Health Organization works collaboratively in gathering data and local analyses of efforts to minimize preventable disability and maximize rehabilitation program availability with partners across the globe. These organizations, global in nature, have benefitted from the insights raised by people with disabilities and scholars working at the intersections of disability, religion, and justice. This essay examines the efficacy and opportunities of international coalitions available with these organizations so as to challenge the ethics of simple accommodations with a more robust social justice of affirmation and advocacy for people with disabilities: a new paradigm for our churches and our world.

RACE, GRIEVANCE SYSTEMS, AND PRISONERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE IN THREE CALIFORNIA PRISONS

AbstractA large body of social science consistently documents race differences in the U.S. criminal justice system and in related perceptions of justice. It is now beyond dispute that the criminal justice system is racialized in a plethora of ways that have consequences for how people perceive justice. Another vast body of literature documents the importance of perceptions of procedural justice in people’s satisfaction with dispute management and outcomes. Informed by these two well-established literatures, we draw on original quantitative and qualitative data, including a random sample of interviews with 120 men in three California prisons, to present an empirical analysis of prisoners’ experiences with the prisoner grievance system, their level of satisfaction with the process and outcomes of that system, and their perceptions of fairness. We find an absence of race effects regarding how fairly they say they have been treated in the past by the criminal justice system and in how they assess justice in the prisoner grievance system in particular. Specifically, we find that: 1) male prisoners’ perceptions of whether the overall criminal justice system has been fair to them in the past does not vary by race in statistically significant ways; and 2) the dominance of substantive grievance outcomes over procedural elements in prisoners’ satisfaction holds regardless of racial self-identification. We explain these findings by arguing that prison may perversely level the attitudinal gap among those who are subject to this profound experience of state power.

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Does Social Protest Shake People’s Justice Beliefs? It Depends on the Level of Group Identification

ABSTRACTWe examined whether social protests will shake people's justice belief, and its potential mechanisms. Participants were reminded of an occurrence of a social protest (vs. an ordinary event) and their justice belief toward social system as well as attitudes toward the protest was measured. Moreover, participants’ perceived group identification with the protesters was measured in Experiment 1 and manipulated in Experiment 2. The results revealed that participants with greater group identification perceived the social system as more just, and were less supportive of the protest than those with low group identification. The implications of these findings were discussed.

Malaysia’s 13th General Election: Sabah-Barisan Nasional Fixed-Deposit State?

As all are aware, the results of the Malaysia 12th General Election(GE-12) in 2008 have surprised many. Not only the dominant parties Barisan Nasional (BN) were shocked by the loss of significant numbers of seats but for the first time in the history of Malaysia politics, vis-a-vis, electoral affairs, they were denied a two-thirds majority in the Parliament. Notwithstanding the opposition parties such as Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR: The People's Justice Party) that form the opposition coalition called Pakatan Rakyat (People's Alliance: PR), has come to a surprised with the GE-12 result, in which they not even think that were able to challenge hegemonic politics of BN, managed to capture and formed a government at the state level namely Kedah, Penang, Perak, and Selangor, except Kelantan which has been under the control of PAS since the 1990 general election. This article aims to analyze whether Sabah as a “fixed deposit”state is still relevant in understanding the continuity and survival of the BN political hegemony in the context of Malaysia political developments post-13th general election.

Networks in Pursuit of a "Two-Coalition System" in Malaysia: Pakatan Rakyat's Mobilization of Dissent between Reformasi and the Tsunami

In Malaysia's 12th general election, held on March 8, 2008, 49 percent of the electorate voted for the non-formalized opposition coalition-made up of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, or People's Justice Party), Parti Islam (PAS, or Islamic Party), and Democratic Action Party (DAP)-and finally cracked the hegemonic hold of the ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front). The opposition made electoral history by winning 82 of 222 seats in Parliament, thus denying the BN its customary two-thirds majority. Among the 11 states in Peninsular Malaysia, the principal political arena, the combined opposition that later formalized its coalition with the name of Pakatan Rakyat (PR, or People's Alliance) took control of the state governments of Kedah, Kelantan, Penang, Perak, and Selangor. In fact, the opposition won 10 of 11 parliamentary seats in Kuala Lumpur; but the national capital, by virtue of being a Federal Territory, continued to be administered by the BN-led federal government.By the standards of Malaysian elections, the regime had been struck by the most destructive wave of voter dissent or the most disastrous convergence of socio-political conditions ever-hence the popular use of the terms and storm1) to depict the outcome of the election. No doubt, the two metaphors had to be used with care. A genuine political tsunami would have swept the BN from power altogether. And a perfect storm would not have completely bypassed Sabah and Sarawak.Even so, a watershed had been reached and a two-coalition system might finally have taken shape within Malaysian politics. Since 1990, various dissident parties had envisaged and striven to establish such a system (Khoo 2003, 159-164). But only the present opposition-hereafter PR (unless clearly inapposite)-had actually advanced toward that goal in 2008. To put it differently, one might say that PR had progressed from imagining to realizing dissent, no matter that PR had a long way to go before reaching its ultimate goal of supplanting BN in governing the country. To be sure, it would not do to cast imagination and realization as two disparate acts occurring in strictly demarcated phases. But imagining and realizing dissent may be depicted as two principal tasks to clarify certain qualitative differences between the networks that helped PR in its progression to the tsunami in 2008 from Reformasi in 1999, the latter being the inchoate movement of dissent triggered by mass outrage against the maltreatment of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim-sacked by Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad on September 2, expelled by UMNO (United Malays National Organization) on September 3, and imprisoned by the regime from September 20 (ibid., 100-108).The first networks to consider are the cyber-networks, which broadly included the information and communication technology (ICT)-sited or -enabled links between e-mail lists, discussion groups, Web sites, online media, online forums, blogs, text messages, etc. These cyber-networks were able to perform some crucial functions, from gathering information to disseminating reports, from rallying opinion to rebutting official claims, and from questioning mainstream news reporting to constructing alternative media. In short, PR's cyber-networks wove a web of counter-hegemonic discourses that helped the coalition's organizers, allies, and supporters to imagine themselves as a community of dissent.PR's second type of network consisted of physical coalitions. The term, despite its lexical imprecision, refers to various groupings and organizations having different structures and degrees of cohesion, which brought together PR parties, their allies in civil society, and their supporters at large. These coalitions-themselves offline and groundlevel networks of people-were formed for a range of political actions that extended from issuing informal appeals to joining ad hoc activities, participating in structured events, and making highly organized interventions. …

Pemikiran Tahaluf Siyasi Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) dan Implikasinya Terhadap Pembangunan Negara

In Malaysia, tahaluf siyasi (TS) is happening at the state and federal levels. The word TS here means the cooperation between two or more parties to achieve the same objective and not violating the Islamic shari'ah at the same time. There are two political parties called to implement the TS. First, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS); and secondly, United Malays National Organization (UMNO). PAS used the TS strategy to cooperate with People's Justice Party (PKR), while UMNO collaborate with the National Front (BN). This TS's idea and implementation is inspired so that the both political parties can shows they are bringing the image of Islam. The idea and the implementation of TS is develop accordance to effectiveness of thought regarding the TS strategy in both political parties. Referring to the ideas of these parties, TS shows synonymous with PAS because of two matters. First, PAS's policy; and second, PAS as an Islamic movement. Therefore, this article aims to identifying TS's thought in PAS and to analyze the implications of this thought against the Malaysia's development. The identification in this article also has been done using the library research and in-depth interview. Meanwhile, the analysis is performed using the method of content analysis. As a result, there are only two ways of PAS when it comes to TS thought. First, the way to preach; and second, the way to fight their common enemy which is BN. From here, we can see the two-way thinking is indirectly do not affect the development in this country. However, these are three implications from PAS thought about their TS is effected indirectly to the development of this country. First, PAS can be under the central government based on the federalism; second, the declaration of Welfare State by PAS; and third, PAS is opening the economic opportunities for non-Muslims.

Special Module: Plenary Debate from the IUAES World Congress 2013: Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds, 5–10 August 2013

ABSTRACTThis module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the motion: ‘Justice for people must come before justice for the environment’. The introduction is followed by an edited transcript of John Gledhill’s welcome and introduction, the texts of the arguments made by each speaker for and against the motion (with the exception of Veronica Strang, whose presentation is being published elsewhere a summary of the comments and questions subsequently invited from the floor of the hall, and then a transcript of the responses of the presenters.

Polityczne sterowanie systemem wymiaru sprawiedliwości PRL po 1956 r. Casus funkcjonowania „zespołów” do spraw procesów politycznych w latach 1964–1982

Political Steering of the Administration of Justice in People’s Poland until 1956. The Functioning of “Teams” Dealing with Political Trials in 1964–1982 This article describes the mechanism of the impact exerted by Party authorities upon the form, course, and outcome of numerous political trials conducted after 1956. The presented findings are based on the results of an extensive survey carried out in the documentation of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (CC PUWP), the General Prosecutor’s Office of the People’s Republic of Poland, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Security Service. Preserved documents makes it possible to prove and characterise Party influence upon trials involving several most important political cases during the 1964–1982 period: the trials of Kuro n and Modzelewski, the student opposition Komandosi and Taternicy , the conspiratorial Ruch organisation, KSS–KOR (Social Self–defence Committee – KOR/ Workers Defence Committee/), KPN (Confederation for an Independent Poland), and the so– called Jedenastka , i.e. the leaders of “Solidarity” and chief advisers of the trade unions – members of the democratic opposition. The analysed sources testify that the ultimate shape of the indictments and the course of a given trial were established during meetings held by a small group, often described as a “team”. Such “team” sessions were attended by representatives of the CC PUWP (the Administration Department of the CC), the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, and often the representatives of the Ministry of Justice or even the Supreme Court. Much indicates that these solutions functioned for years to come and were of a systemic character. They guaranteed taking into account the political interests of the Political Bureau and a matching staging of the trials’ course.

Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education. By Arlene S. Kanter and Beth A. Ferri, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2013. 402 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education. By Arlene S. Kanter and Beth A. Ferri, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2013. 402 pp. $45.00 cloth.This exciting new anthology edited by Arlene Kanter and Beth Ferri originates in the Disability Studies in Education Second City conference held in 2009 at Syracuse University and breaks new ground for all concerned with promoting equality and justice for people with disabilities. While there have been others who have written anthologies linking disability studies and law (see Jones & Basser Marks 1999; Pothier & Devlin 2006) and a CRN devoted to Disability Legal Studies was recently established at the Law and Society Association, this volume is unique in analyzing the contributions of disability studies specifically to the field of education and education law. Bringing together a vibrant group of American legal and educational scholars who write about disability rights issues, including Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, Philip Ferguson and Mark Weber among others, the text broadly covers three main themes. The first four chapters analyze the intersections between law, education, and disability studies. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explore the historical exclusion of people with disabilities in education. The remaining five chapters are focused on the experiences of people with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 (IDEA). While disability studies is a growing field and contains scholars with a wide variety of ideological and theoretical perspectives, a common thread is the notion that disability is largely a social construct rather than a personal tragedy (pp. 4, 7). The precise contours and interpretation of the social model have been extensively debated by disability studies scholars, but the belief that one must focus on altering structural barriers that are endemic and deeply rooted in society in areas such as education, employment, and transportation unites the contributors.The volume opens with an engaging and powerful essay by Arlene Kanter on the relationship between law and disability studies. She effectively communicates for the uninitiated differences between a medical approach to disablement and a social model approach, as well as the various nuances in social model theory. Citing the seminal work of Robert Cover (1986), she also capably illustrates the importance of using appropriate language when writing and speaking about disability to dismantle discriminatory attitudes toward people with disabilities (p. 14). She provides three compelling reasons why disability studies ought to be of value to legal scholars. First, disability is an open-ended category that can affect anyone at any time. As Kanter correctly notes, people with disabilities are the fastest growing minority group in the world (p. 28). Second, disability is too often omitted from policy discussions on diversity, on university campuses and elsewhere (p. 31). While Kanter is undoubtedly accurate in describing the American legal and political context, I should note that some countries, such as Canada, have included disability as a long established legal criterion for what is known as affirmative action in the United States and it is very much part of the conversations around diversity and inclusion in universities and employment. Finally, she suggests that disability studies shed light on the values of our legal system through narratives and jurisprudence. From veterans to circus freaks to grassroots advocates for accessibility, the stories of people with disabilities require retelling. The role of the long forgotten League of the Physically Handicapped in challenging exclusion from government relief during the Great Depression is just one illustration (p. 32). Kanter might have added that the analysis of narratives of people with disabilities, and its relationship to identity and law has become a pivotal focus of some legal scholars (Engel and Munger 2002; Malhotra and Rowe 2014). …

Politics, Law, and Justice in People's Poland: the Fieldorf File

This article examines the case against the Polish resistance fighter August Emil Fieldorf and his subsequent trial. Judicial officials within, or working intimately with, the Soviet secret police made decisions affecting many lives in Poland in 1944-1956. A consideration of the trial proceedings and the backgrounds of selected judicial officials provide a better understanding of the nature of Stalinist justice. Key issues underpinning the trial, related to political contexts, legal maneuverings, and broader considerations surrounding the defendant through the eyes of his persecutors, shed light on the hidden mechanism of Stalinist justice in operation and what constitutes a judicial crime. While its focus is Fieldorf, this article argues that the Polish case study can be instructive in analyzing the ways in which the law was used as a political weapon in other states and regions with similar experiences of totalitarian rule.

The Impact of Within and Between Occupational Inequalities on People's Justice Perceptions Towards Their Own Earnings

This paper investigates justice perceptions of employees towards their own earnings. Earnings are decomposed into three components: (1) In returns based on human capital endowments, (2) in returns based on individual residual differences and (3) in returns based on differences between occupations. The legitimacy of these earnings components is measured via the justice assessments of employees. Based on theoretical models from justice research and class theory it is hypothesized that earnings inequality resulting from human capital factors is evaluated as just, whereas residual inequality and occupational inequality are perceived as unjust. The hypotheses are tested by using data from a German longitudinal panel study (SOEP) of the years 2005 to 2011. These data allow studying changes of individual earnings and justice evaluations in a household panel over the time span of six years (with four biennial measurement points). The findings support our hypotheses indicating that losses or gains in earnings which are due to changes in human capital endowments do not affect justice perceptions of own earnings. Losses or gains stemming from changes of a person's earnings position within the occupational group or the position of a person's occupational group within the earnings hierarchy of a society, however, affect justice perceptions remarkably. Thus, we can show that justice evaluations of own earnings do not solely depend on compensation for individual investments but also on residual differences in earnings within and between occupational groups.

Humanistic Psychology’s Social Justice Philosophy

Racism has held a prominent place in much of psychology discourse, but humanistic psychology may not yet have realized its full potential to contribute in meaningful ways to dialogues about racism. The purpose of this article is to help direct racism and social justice issues to the forefront of humanistic psychology, outlining ways in which humanistic psychologists can draw on their historical values and strengths to develop individual-level and societal interventions to reduce racism, as well as its psychosocial and physical health effects on People of Color. This article discusses a number of domains in the study of racism where humanistic principles have the potential to guide interventions. These domains include internalized racism, race-based traumatic stress as an American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosis, the role of White individuals in creating and combating racism, the psychosocial costs of racism to White individuals, and the interactions of other forms of oppression with racism. Humanistic psychologists are encouraged to move beyond the walls of academia, engage the community, and reengineer systems that undercut justice for People of Color.

Aspek Hukum Perencanaan Tata Ruang Kawasan Perkotaan di Indonesia

ABSTRACT: A City problem is very complicated; it is caused by the needs of human being life, which increases routinely. In solving that problem, it requires the availability solution through regulation. One of the regulations needed is through the City Region Spatial Planning. The people must obey that regulation. It is expected thst it could create environmental balancing, sustainability, and finally it can create welfare and justice for people. Legal Aspect o f Spatial Planning f or City Space i n Indonesia

Justice for People with Disabilities: Philosophical and Theological Arguments

AbstractPeople with disabilities should, of course, enjoy the same right as others to a self-determined life of freedom and dignity as well as the same chances to attain such a life. The question is to what extent the concepts of justice in philosophy and theology take into account their interests and needs. In answering this question I shall refer to the theory of justice from John Rawls at first. In my second point I will focus on the criticism of this theory with regard to people with disabilities. Thirdly, at least in one respect the theological concepts of justice and love can supplement a needed element. Lastly, conclusions will be drawn with regard to an inclusive church.

Care Ethics and Carers with Learning Disabilities: A Challenge to Dependence and Paternalism

People with learning disabilities are one of the most excluded groups of people in British society and have historically been positioned as being in need of lifelong care, incapable of looking after themselves. In this context people with learning disabilities have been positioned as the recipients of care; always the cared for and never the carer. However, more recent policy initiatives have meant that they are now more able to exercise some control over their lives. In addition, changes in institutionalised care, increases in life expectancy, and the growing number of people with learning disabilities who are living with partners have all resulted in more and more people with learning disabilities becoming carers. Nevertheless, they are still a largely hidden group about whom little is known. This paper utilises a personal narrative taken from the author's own life to contextualise the issue. Drawing on this experience, and further research on carers with learning disabilities, the author moves from the personal to develop a philosophical and theoretical discussion which demonstrates the way in which a political ethic of care can serve to reposition the lives of people with learning disabilities as valued and respected citizens. Drawing on the work of key commentators, the paper considers the concepts of collective agency, caring citizenship, moral agency, interdependency and relationality, to explore the positioning of people with learning disabilities in Western society and demonstrate the way in which relationships of care may be used to forward claims for citizenship and social justice for people with learning disabilities.

The Queer Intimacy of Global Vision: Documentary Practice and the AIDS Pandemic

This paper examines the visual and narrative geographies of AIDS in the documentaries Pandemic and A Closer Walk (both of which came out in 2003). Each film offers a travelogue of diverse sites affected by HIV/AIDS in order to politicize viewers' understanding of their place in the global pandemic, seeking to remake the spatial subjectivities that support a dangerously disinterested status quo that allows preventable illness and death to occur. In exploring the spatial politics of mass-mediated subject formation through these conventionally accessible documentaries, I argue that each film hopes to offer what I will call a ‘queer optic’ on global AIDS, enabling viewers to look critically at the structures of inequality that normalize preventable suffering. By challenging normative ways of looking at AIDS, these documentaries seek to produce visual intimacies with the hope of diminishing the distinterest of distance. However, neither film is able to realize its boldest ambitions. While recognizing their strong commitment to greater justice for people living with HIV/AIDS, I argue that each film employs narrative and visual strategies that ultimately limit their efficacy as political projects. In various ways, they struggle with and in substantive ways fail to dislodge colonial narratives and optics. By examining their projects through a theoretical framework influenced by early AIDS video activism, I demonstrate the importance of identifying visual strategies that resist neoimperial logics that too often shape the representation of spatial Others.