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In 2013, the European Union (EU) mission in Zambia made a public statement about its financial support to the LGBTI community. In panic and fear, LGBTI leaders urged the EU office to withdraw the statement and encouraged other foreign missions to instead offer discrete support to the LGBTI community. This anecdote is illustrative of the experiential gap between geopolitical groups confronting a similar policy issue. For the EU, the rights of LGBTI persons are universally important; for the LGBTI community in the Zambian context, safety and discretion are more important. This paradox illustrates the challenges facing the transnationalizing of disability policy. How could we explain the fact that transnational disability actors have for the last two decades been trying to disseminate disability ‘knowledge’ and norms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) without corresponding social policy and ideational success? This article examines this policy and ontological discrepancy. Advancing a constructivist argument, the article contends that transnational policy diffusion, largely built on colonial legacies of universalizing Western knowledge paradigms, has preoccupied itself with political institutional engagements at the expense of engaging contextspecific sociological and ideological factors, resulting in sterile legislative exercises. To develop a truly SSA-relevant disability policy infrastructure, the article proposes ideational bricolaging and translation, a constructivist process of carefully adhering to and negotiating with context-specific ideational factors that inform the disability experience in SSA countries.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2018, Vol. 5 No. 1

This paper explores connections between affect studies and critical disability studies. Our interest in affect is sparked by the beginnings of a new research project that seeks to illuminate the lives, hopes and desires of young people with ‘life-limiting’ or ‘life-threatening’ impairments. Cultural responses to these young people are shaped by dominant discourses associated with lives lived well and long. Before commencing our empirical work with young people we use this paper to think through how we might conceptualise affect and disability. We present three themes; ontological invalidation in neoliberal-able times; affect aliens and crip killjoys; disability and resistant assemblages.

Background: Currently, inadequate wheelchair provision has forced many people with disabilities to be trapped in a cycle of poverty and deprivation, limiting their ability to access education, work and social facilities. This issue is in part because of the lack of collaboration among various stakeholders who need to work together to design, manufacture and deliver such assistive mobility devices. This in turn has led to inadequate evidence about intervention effectiveness, disability prevalence and subsequent costeffectiveness that would help facilitate appropriate provision and support for people with disabilities.

Objectives: In this paper, we describe a novel conceptual framework that can be tested across the globe to study and evaluate the effectiveness of wheelchair provision.

Method: The Comparative Effectiveness Research Subcommittee (CER-SC), consisting of the authors of this article, housed within the Evidence-Based Practice Working Group (EBP-WG) of the International Society of Wheelchair Professionals (ISWP), conducted a scoping review of scientific literature and standard practices used during wheelchair service provision. The literature review was followed by a series of discussion groups.

Results: The three iterations of the conceptual framework are described in this manuscript.

Conclusion: We believe that adoption of this conceptual framework could have broad applications in wheelchair provision globally to develop evidence-based practices. Such a perspective will help in the comparison of different strategies employed in wheelchair provision and further improve clinical guidelines. Further work is being conducted to test the efficacy of this conceptual framework to evaluate effectiveness of wheelchair service provision in various settings across the globe.

Physical restraint is used in inpatient services for people with intellectual disabilities as a way of holding a person to avoid injury. This article uses data from an ethnographic study in a locked unit in the north of England to explore women’s experiences of physical restraint using a feminist disability studies analysis. Data consists of field notes as well as interviews with 16 of the women who had experienced restraint, and 10 staff who worked with them. The women gave insights into the gendered phenomenon of restraint in light of their past experiences of violence. The authors argue that restraint is used with women to encourage passivity at times when more relational and therapeutic methods could be used. The article offers recommendations for alternative strategies that services can encourage.

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.

This article explores the significance of disability for social justice, using Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice as a guideline. The article argues that the disability perspective is essential for understanding and promoting social justice, although it is often disregarded by critical thinkers and social activists. The article looks at three prominent strategies for achieving social justice under conditions of capitalism: economically, by decommodifying labour; culturally, by deconstructing self-sufficiency; and politically, by transnationalising democracy. The disability perspective reveals that decommodification of labour requires enhancement of disability support, deconstruction of self-sufficiency requires valorisation of disability-illuminated interdependence, and transnationalisation of democracy requires scrutiny of the transnational production of impairments. The article discusses each of these strategies in theoretical and practical terms by drawing on disability studies and Fraser’s analyses.

In previous research, meeting places have been favourably addressed by service users, but they have also been contested as exclusionary. In this participatory explorative study, we sought to perform a contextual analysis of meeting places in Norway based on a discourse analysis of three focus group discussions with 15 staff members. We asked the following question: how do meeting-place employees discuss their concrete and abstract encounters with service users and their experiences? We focused on service user involvement, which was largely analysed as neoliberal consultation and responsibilisation. Service users were positioned as resisting responsibility trickling down and defending staffed meeting places. Social democratic discourse was identified in the gaps of neoliberal discourse, which is noteworthy given that Norway is a social democracy. This relates to global concerns about displacements of democracy. We suggest that meeting places appear to hold the potential for staff and service users to collaborate more democratically.

There are three key revelations from literature on disability and armed conflict in the Global South. First, though disability is a relative term, models from the Global North are widely used irrespective of indigenous knowledges and contexts. Second, though disability is caused by colonial and post-colonial inequalities such as poverty, disabled people are often forgotten in poverty reduction programmes. Third, while many countries experience armed conflict, little is known about its effects on disabled people living in contexts of armed conflict. This realisation led to the aims of this study which were to: i) investigate how disability is understood in the armed conflict setting of Uganda; ii) to understand the experiences of disabled people in armed conflict settings; and iii) examine ways of improving the experience of disabled people in the Global South. Using a critical, constructivist and grounded research methodology, the study revealed the nature of ‘African disabilities’ and the challenges faced by disabled people living in conflict settings: displacement, dehumanisation, rampant poverty and neo-colonialism. Disabled people experience rejection in their communities and invisibility in the provision of services. Using literature as a dialogue partner, this study concludes that the ways in which disabled people are treated runs counter to many African beliefs on what it means to be human and live in a community. Consequently, it proposes a theory which contains critical knowledge on how the Africanisation of disability could be thought of and brought about in conflict settings.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2016, Vol. 3 No. 1

This article is based on a qualitative study that set out to analyze the labels and terms attached to 28 people affected by albinism in villages in Kilolo district, Tanzania. Even though national and international attention to killings of people with albinism has attempted to improve general knowledge of albinism and reduce discrimination, most of the community members within the study had lit- tle knowledge of the (bio)medical explanations for albinism and tended to marginalize people with albinism. Framed within a wider moral discourse on ill- ness, disability and socially appropriate behavior, albinism is mostly considered to be God’s will or the consequence of past misdeeds within the family, and many of the existing labels for people with albinism express such ideas.