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‘We create our own small world’: daily realities of mothers of disabled children in a South African urban settlement

VAN DER MARK, Elise J
CONRADIE, Ina
DEDDING, Christine W M
BROERSE, Jacqueline E W
2018

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Parents of disabled children face many challenges. Understanding their experiences and acknowledging contextual influences is vital in developing intervention strategies that fit their daily realities. However, studies of parents from a resource-poor context are particularly scarce. This ethnographic study with 30 mothers from a South African township (15 semi-structured interviews and 24 participatory group sessions) unearths how mothers care on their own, in an isolated manner. The complexity of low living standards, being poorly supported by care structures and networks, believing in being the best carer, distrusting others due to a violent context, and resigning towards life shape and are shaped by this solitary care responsibility. For disability inclusive development to be successful, programmes should support mothers by sharing the care responsibility taking into account the isolated nature of mothers’ lives and the impact of poverty. This can provide room for these mothers to increase the well-being of themselves and their children.

Austerity and the lives of people with learning disabilities. A thematic synthesis of current literature

MALLI, Melina Aikaterini
SAMS, Lara
FORRESTER-JONES, Rachel
MURPHY, Glynis
HENWOOD, Melanie
2018

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The Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in many western economies implementing cuts in health and social care. This systematic review provides a holistic picture of the impact of austerity policy on the lives of people with learn- ing disabilities (LD) and the collateral effects on the people who support them. Our review suggests that in the current climate of economic austerity, available funding to support people with LD is no longer aligned to their care needs. Cuts in disability services have adversely affected the well- being both of people with LD and their informal carers. Individuals with LD have lost social support and are experi- encing increased social isolation. Heightened demands on family carers’ time have negatively influenced their wider roles, including parental functioning, and labour market participation. Our review provides the foundations for fur- ther discourse and research on the effects of austerity on people with LD and their family carers.

Inheritance, poverty, and disability

GROCE, Nora Ellen
LONDON, Jillian
STEIN, Michael Ashley
2014

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Inheritance is a significant means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next, and therefore increasingly attracts attention from researchers and pol- icy-makers working on intergenerational and multidimensional poverty. How- ever, until now disabled persons have been overlooked in these discussions. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because, as a group, the estimated one bil- lion people with disabilities (some 15% of the world’s population) are among the poorest and most marginalized of the global population. Over the past dec- ade, a small but growing literature has examined the recursive connections between poverty and disability throughout the developing world. In this paper, we argue that disabled individuals are routinely denied inheritance rights in many low-income and middle-income countries, and that this is a significant and largely unrecognized contributor to their indigence. The denial of inheritance is both a social justice issue and a practice that can no longer be overlooked if disabled persons are to be brought into the development mainstream.

Dis/ability and austerity: beyond work and slow death

GOODLEY, Dan
LAWTHOM, Rebecca
RUNSWICK-COLE, Katherine
2014

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The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased preca- rity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics.

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