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This study aimed to provide better understanding of intimacy and marriage, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood experiences of women with disability in Ethiopia. Qualitative, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews along with personal observations were used to explore the full experiences of participants, as told in their own words. The result of the interviews indicated that relationships and motherhood proved a very rewarding option for women with disabilities. They also expressed their need for intimacy regardless of society’s denial. Challenges identified include negative societal attitudes toward women with disabilities regarding relationship, pregnancy, and child-rearing. Accessibility of health centers in addition to the ignorance and negative attitudes of the physicians are also reported to be major challenges for the interviewees. This study highlights how rewarding the experience of motherhood was for the interviewees and also shows that women with disabilities face challenges at every step of their experiences, because of society’s prejudices toward disability.

Purpose: In low- and middle-income countries, reliable and disaggregated disability data on prevalence, participation and barriers is often not available. This study aimed to estimate disability prevalence, determine associated socio-demographic factors and compare access in the community between people with and without disability in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand, India, using the Rapid Assessment of Disability Survey.

Methods: A cross-sectional population-based survey was conducted on a sample of 2431 adults, selected using a two-stage cluster randomised sampling technique. The survey comprised an interviewer-administered household survey and an individual survey measuring disability, wellbeing and participation.  For each person with disability, an age and sex-matched control (without disability) was selected. In addition to prevalence, the difference in participation and barriers faced by people with and without disability were analysed.

Results and Conclusions: The prevalence of disability was 6.8% (95% CI 5.8-7.8) with significant associations with age, sex, economic status, education and employment. Psychosocial distress (4.8%) and mobility impairment (2.7%) were the most common disabilities identified. The study showed that people with disabilities had significantly less access to services than those without disability, and the barriers reported most often were lack of information, transport and physical inaccessibility.

Background: With the dawn of the new sustainable development goals, we face not only a world that has seen great successes in alleviating poverty but also a world that has left some groups, such as persons with disabilities, behind. Middle-income countries (MICs) are home to a growing number of persons with disabilities. As these countries strive to achieve the new goals, we have ample opportunity to include persons with disabilities in the emerging poverty alleviation strategies. However, a lack of data and research on the linkages between economic vulnerability and disability in MICs hampers our understanding of the factors increasing economic vulnerability in people with disabilities.

Methods: This article aims to present data related to elements of this vulnerability in one MIC, South Africa. Focusing on out-of-pocket costs, it uses focus group discussions with 73 persons with disabilities and conventional content analysis to describe these costs.

Results: A complex and nuanced picture of disability-driven costs evolved on three different areas: care and support for survival and safety, accessibility of services and participation in community. Costs varied depending on care and support needs, accessibility (physical and financial), availability, and knowledge of services and assistive devices.

Conclusions: The development of poverty alleviation and social protection mechanisms in MICs like South Africa needs to better consider diverse disability-related care and support needs not only to improve access to services such as education and health (National Health Insurance schemes, accessible clinics) but also to increase the effect of disability-specific benefits and employment equity policies.

Presented by actress and comedian Sally Phillips, A World Without Down’s Syndrome has brought important ethical debates regarding prenatal screening into the public domain. By talking to people with Down’s syndrome, family members, and professionals, Sally has presented a nuanced and thorough examination of the type of world we are living in. Following the documentary, Twitter users have continued to engage with debates and have created a resilient platform for challenging public attitudes. This paper explores the ways in which Twitter hashtags have provided a space for such important and long overdue conversations. While it would not be possible to provide a full overview of the topical conversations that the two hashtags have provoked, I aim to focus on some of the most prominent topics. The following, then, will explore the potential of alternative narratives that resist, and disrupt, normative notions of the human using the hashtags #worldwithoutdowns and #justaboutcoping.

Background: While it is widely assumed that disability, poverty and health are closely linked, research falls short of fully understanding the link. One approach to analysing the links between disability and poverty is through the concept of structural violence, referring to social structures that contribute to the impoverishment of individuals or communities. These structures can be political, ecological, legal and economic, among others.

Objective: To explore structural violence and how it affects families of children with cerebral palsy among the Tonga ethnic group living in poor rural communities of Binga in Zimbabwe.

Method: This is a longitudinal, qualitative and ethnographic study. Data were collected over a period of eight years from 2005 to 2013. Data collection techniques were in-depth interviews, participant observation and focus group discussions. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 53 informants.

Results: Structural violence was noted through four themes: internal displacement and development, food and politics, water and sanitation, and social services. Poverty was noted in the form of unemployment, lack of education, healthcare, food and shelter. The concept of structural violence inflicted social suffering on the informants. Politics played a major role in activities such as food withdrawal, lack of water, development and allocation of local resources to ‘the people of the city’, leaving the informants struggling with care.

Conclusion: Political and economic forces have structured risks and created a situation of extreme human suffering. The capabilities approach brings out the challenges associated with cerebral palsy in the context of development challenges.

This paper interrogates how school toilets and ‘school readiness’ are used to assess children against developmental milestones. Such developmental norms both inform school toilet design and practice, and perpetuate normative discourses of childhood as middle-class, white, ‘able’, heteronormative, cissexist and inferior to adulthood. Critical psychology and critical disability studies frame our analysis of conversations from online practitioner forums. We show that school toilets and the norms and ideals of ‘toilet training’ act as one device for Othering those who do not fit into normative Western discourses of ‘childhood’. Furthermore, these idealised discourses of ‘childhood’ reify classed, racialised, gendered and dis/ablist binaries of good/bad parenting. We conclude by suggesting new methodological approaches to school toilet research which resist perpetuating developmental assumptions and prescriptions. In doing this, the paper is the first to explicitly bring school toilet research into the realms of critical psychology and critical disability studies.

This paper draws on feminist and queer philosophers? discussions of precarity and employment, too often absent from disability studies, to explore the working lives of people with learning disabilities in England in a time of austerity. Recent policy shifts from welfare to work welcome more disabled people into the job market. The reality is that disabled people remain under-represented in labour statistics and are conspicuously absent in cultures of work. We live in neoliberal- able times where we all find ourselves precarious. But, people with learning disabilities experience high levels of uncertainty in every aspect of their lives, including work, relationships and community living. Our research reveals an important analytical finding: that when people with learning disabilities are supported in imaginative and novel ways they are able to work effectively and cohesively participate in their local communities (even in a time of cuts to welfare). We conclude by acknowledging that we are witnessing a global politics of precarity and austerity. Our urgent task is to redress the unequal spread of precaritization across our society that risks leaving people with learning disabilities experiencing disproportionately perilous lives. One of our key recommendations is that it makes no economic sense (never mind moral sense) to pull funding from organisations that support people with intellectual disabilities to work.

Background: Uganda has embraced inclusive education and evidently committed itself to bringing about disability inclusion at every level of education. Both legal and non-legal frameworks have been adopted and arguably are in line with the intent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on education. The CRPD, in Article 24, requires states to attain a right to education for persons with disabilities without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunities at all levels of education.

Objectives: Despite Uganda’s robust disability legal and policy framework on education, there is evidence of exclusion and discrimination of students with disabilities in the higher education institutions. The main objective of this article is to explore the status of disability inclusion in higher education and strategies for its realisation, using evidence from Emong’s study, workshop proceedings where the authors facilitated and additional individual interviews with four students with disabilities by the authors.

Results: The results show that there are discrimination and exclusion tendencies in matters related to admissions, access to lectures, assessment and examinations, access to library services, halls of residence and other disability support services.

Conclusion: The article recommends that institutional policies and guidelines on support services for students with disabilities and special needs in higher education be developed, data on students with disabilities collected to help planning, collaboration between Disabled Peoples Organisations (DPO’s) strengthened to ensure disability inclusion and the establishment of disability support centres.

In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site [Elias, 1978. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell] in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider ‘toilet training’ as a form of ‘civilisation’, that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that ‘toilet training’ continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research.