Disability Rights Monitoring And Social Change

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has provided a significant catalyst and a legal mandate for disability rights monitoring, and discussions on disability rights are breaking new ground across disciplines. Disability, Rights Monitoring, and Social Change is an important and timely collection that explores and challenges the ways in which disability rights are monitored. The contributors to this edited volume range from grassroots activists to international scholars and United Nations advisors. The chapters address the current theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding disability rights monitoring and offer a detailed look at law and policy reforms, best practices, and holistic methods. This unique compilation crosses the divide between the global South and North and explores the complex issues of intersectionality that arise for women with disabilities, Indigenous peoples with disabilities, and people with diverse disabilities. Its participatory methodology-calling for the inclusion of people with disabilities in processes that involve them-and its local and international perspective make this book a critical contribution to the fields of rights monitoring and disability studies. Appropriate for courses on disability, human rights, social justice, policy, and advocacy, this volume serves as a guide and learning tool for anyone interested in disability rights monitoring and, more generally, the effective practice of monitoring human rights.

'Disability and Social Change' will reveal how life has changed for disabled people growing up in Britain over the past 70 years, from the 1940s to the present day. It seeks to provide an in-depth examination of the interplay between individual biography and social context.

This book provides insight into the globally interlinked disability rights community and its political efforts today. By analysing what disability rights activism contributes to a global power apparatus of disability-related knowledge, it demonstrates how disability advocacy influences the way we categorise, classify, distribute, manipulate, and therefore transform knowledge. By unpacking the mutually constitutive relations between (practical) moral knowledge of international disability advocates and (formal) disability rights norms that are codified in international treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the author shows that the disability rights movement is largely critical of statements that attempt to streamline it. At the same time, cross-cultural disability rights advocacy requires images of uniformity to stabilise its global legitimacy among international stakeholders and retain a common meta-code that visibly identifies its means and aims. As an epistemic community, disability rights advocates simultaneously rely on and contest the authority of international human rights infrastructure and its language. Proving that disability rights advocates contribute immensely to a global culture that standardises what is considered morally and legally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, thereby shaping the human body and the body politic, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of critical disability studies, sociology of knowledge, legal and linguistic anthropology, social inequality, and social movements.

This book explores the diverse ways in which disability activism and advocacy are experienced and practised by people with disabilities and their allies. Contributors to the book explore the very different strategies and campaigns they have used to have their demands for respect, dignity and rights heard and acted upon by their communities, by national governments and the international community. The book, with its contemporary global focus, makes a significant contribution to the field of disability and social justice studies, particularly at a time of major social, political and cultural upheaval. Global Perspectives on Disability Activism and Advocacy offers a significant intervention within the field of disability at a time of major social upheaval where actors, advocates and activists are seeking to hold onto existing claims for rights, equality and disability justice.

This book examines the changing relationship between disability and the law, addressing the intersection of human rights principles, human rights law, domestic law and the experience of people with disabilities. Drawn from the global experience of scholars and activists in a number of jurisdictions and legal systems, the core human rights principles of dignity, equality and inclusion and participation are analyzed within a framework of critical disability legal scholarship.

This book seeks to explore how disability is understood and the position and experiences of disabled people both within and across different societies. The authors explore the question of politics in relation to specific struggles, providing a wealth of insights and ideas, and examine the nature and value of a social model of disability. They criticize exclusionary barriers while advancing a more democratic and participatory society based on principles of equality, offer cross-cultural insights and present stimuli for debate and further research. The text is accessible, topical, and provides new and innovatory thinking. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers with interests in education, social policy, sociology and disability studies.

Examining how policy affects the human rights of people with disabilities, this topical Handbook presents diverse empirical experiences of disability policy and identifies the changes that are necessary to achieve social justice.