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Humanitarian organisations can learn a lot from what happened during the Cyclone Idai aid response. The cyclone and its impact made global headlines. The NGO community reacted fast. More than 400 organisations and 1,000 aid workers were rapidly deployed to the affected areas of Mozambique. But what happened next remains untold.

Their stories, which form the basis of our recommendations, can help key actors improve their responses to other crises, including COVID-19.

Purpose

Orientation and Mobility (O&M) professionals teach people with low vision or blindness to use specialist assistive technologies to support confident travel, but many O&M clients now prefer a smartphone. This study aimed to investigate what technology O&M professionals in Australia and Malaysia have, use, like, and want to support their client work, to inform the development of O&M technologies and build capacity in the international O&M profession.

Materials and Methods

A technology survey was completed by professionals (n = 36) attending O&M workshops in Malaysia. A revised survey was completed online by O&M specialists (n = 31) primarily in Australia. Qualitative data about technology use came from conferences, workshops and interviews with O&M professionals. Descriptive statistics were analysed together with free-text data.

Results

Limited awareness of apps used by clients, unaffordability of devices, and inadequate technology training discouraged many O&M professionals from employing existing technologies in client programmes or for broader professional purposes. Professionals needed to learn smartphone accessibility features and travel-related apps, and ways to use technology during O&M client programmes, initial professional training, ongoing professional development and research.

Conclusions

Smartphones are now integral to travel with low vision or blindness and early-adopter O&M clients are the travel tech-experts. O&M professionals need better initial training and then regular upskilling in mainstream O&M technologies to expand clients’ travel choices. COVID-19 has created an imperative for technology laggards to upskill for O&M tele-practice. O&M technology could support comprehensive O&M specialist training and practice in Malaysia, to better serve O&M clients with complex needs.

This article aims to reorient thinking about the relationship between the long-standing social model of disability and the rapidly emerging human rights model. In particular, it contests the influential view that the latter develops and improves upon the former (the improvement thesis) and argues instead that the two models are complementary (the complementarity thesis). The article begins with a discursive analysis of relevant documents to investigate how each of the two models has been used in the crafting and monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This highlights the increasing importance of the human rights model in this policy context. It also provides examples of the operation of the two models which inform the remainder of the discussion. We then critique the comparisons between the models which underpin the improvement thesis; and, drawing on Foucault’s technologies of power and Beckett and Campbell’s ‘oppositional device’ methodology, deepen and develop this comparative analysis. The result, we argue, is that the two models have different subjects and different functions. In the human rights context, their roles are complementary and supportive.

Notions of family life and romantic partnership, like notions of disability, have been culturally constructed and socially produced over historical time, and our understandings of these notions are being continually challenged and re-negotiated across time and space. Policies, institutions, and cultural practices across the globe have brought about changes to the construction of the family and to the rights and inclusion of disabled people in private and public life. This special issue brings together a collection of studies from different countries and time periods to explore the interplay between disability, romantic partnerships, and family life across the individual lifetime and between generations. With this interdisciplinary collection, we seek to merge disability research and research on family and partnerships through a life course lens. This offers unique insights and opportunities to interconnect his- torical and cultural location and changing social institutions with individual and family experiences. This introduction presents the eight studies in the collection and discusses them within a life course frame that views disabled people’s roles as partners, spouses, and members of a family. In so doing, it engages in an analysis of (dis)similarities concerning how family dynamics, romantic relationships, and disability have developed over time and in different spaces.

In order to explore the experiences of persons with physical disabilities accessing and using rehabilitation services in Sierra Leone, interviews with 38 individuals with differing physical disabilities were carried out in three locations across Sierra Leone (Freetown, Bo and Makeni).

The analysis resulted in six themes:  The initial and ongoing need for rehabilitation throughout life; Challenges with the cost of rehabilitation and transportation to reach rehabilitation services; Varied experiences with rehabilitation staff; Coming to terms with disability and facing stigma; The struggles without and opportunities with rehabilitation services; Limited knowledge and availability of rehabilitation services.

Addressing barriers to affordability, access, and availability of rehabilitation and addressing knowledge gaps, attitudinal barriers and stigma towards rehabilitation and persons with disability are discussed.

Disability and Rehabilitation, April 2020

DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2020.1755375

Fostering equity by offering the best education possible to all students is one of the main goals of inclusive schooling. One instrument to implement individualised education is individualised education planning (IEP). IEP requires cooperation between special and regular teachers. From research on school leadership it is known that leadership styles are connected to the way, school leaders use their scope of action with respect to fostering collaboration. However, little is known about the relationship between the leadership of a school, the provision of structures for collaboration, and the implementation of IEP in an inclusive context. The article focuses on the question to what extent transformational (TL) and instructional leadership (IL) are connected to the provision of structures for collaboration and how TL and IL as well as structures for collaboration relate to the implementation of IEP directly and indirectly. Based on data of N = 135 German schools, a path model was calculated. It revealed medium relations between TL, IL, and structures for collaboration as well as a medium effect from structures to collaboration on implementation of IEP. The effect from TL towards implementation of IEP was fully mediated by structures for collaboration, while the effect from IL persisted.

Today’s society promises that people with disabilities can access anything, but in practice there are numerous obstacles, and the ways in which people deal with them can be easily missed or taken for granted by policy makers. This article draws on a project in which researchers ‘go along’ people with disabilities in Sweden who demonstrate and recount accessibility troubles in urban and digital settings. They display a set of mundane methods for managing inaccessibility: (a) using others, (b) making deals and establishing routines, (c) mimicking or piggybacking conventions, (d) debunking others’ accounts and performing local politics. The employment of these shared but tailored methods shows the difficulties to be accepted that people with disabilities still face, as well as the wide-ranging tension that exists between the grand rhetoric of inclusion and modest results. The tension implies that people with disabilities are required to be creative.

• Declarations and policies often say that people with disabilities should have access to anything, but in practice this is not the case.
• This study investigates what people with disabilities actually do when they have trouble accessing various places or resources. The results show their common and practical ways, and these ways are often taken for granted, overlapping, and combined.
• People with disabilities ask others to support them when they face troubles to access places or resources, they make deals with important actors and they develop routines. They also observe, imitate and follow others’ actions, to pick out precisely those ways that suit their needs.
• When people with disabilities find their ways in today’s society they also act with words. They argue against other people’s excuses or justifications for not providing access.
• The study has found a lot of frustration among people with disabilities who get blocked, excluded or delayed. This gives them motives to engage in politics.

There is growing awareness and international commitment to improving sexual and reproductive health for persons with intellectual disabilities. Despite this, people with intellectual disabilities continue to face stigma and have limited access to sexual health education and information. This qualitative phenomenological study uses data from 10 interviews to describe what it means to teach sexual and reproductive health and rights to students with intellectual disabilities at special-needs schools in southern Sweden. The meaning of teachers’ experience is described through their efforts to ‘accept the challenge to coach special-needs students into adulthood’. Findings show that sexual and reproductive health in special-needs schools covers a broad range of topics and that the teacher must adapt to students’ shifting needs. They also reveal that teachers are motivated and have access to the necessary resources to teach sexual and reproductive health but feel they lack the skills to address students’ particular sexual health issues, including questions of culture and religion. Schools are the main source of sexual health information in Sweden and therefore play a crucial role in providing equal education and promoting public health.

For people with intellectual disabilities who do not enter the labour market, school is usually the main chapter of their socialization with the wider society. Nevertheless, little is known about their long-term perceptions of this period. We conducted interviews and focus groups on the school experiences of 16 Portuguese adults with intellectual disabilities. Results show differences between older and younger participants in their accounts of social relations and educational methods, which result from changes in special educational policies in Portugal. Overall, members of both groups evaluate their school experience positively. Our results indicate that although there is a move towards more inclusive schools, discrimination is still prevalent. These results are discussed in terms of their psychosocial consequences, as well as their implications for educational policies, and inclusion. This study contributes to a better understanding of the school experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and how policies impact them.