Reviews of The New Political Economy of Disability by van Toorn & Disability and Neoliberal State Formations, by Soldatic

Two recent disability studies monographs from Routledge devoted in part to the Australian state and its policies with respect to disabled people break exciting new ground in analyzing the economic marginalization of disabled people and how to empower them. Both volumes are creative, well-researched, and thoughtful contributions to disability studies because of the questions they pose and the insightful, novel ways they encourage us to think about the questions.

Formation, utilisation et expérience du transport en commun régulier à Montréal par des personnes ayant des limitations fonctionnelles motrices

En 2018 et 2019, la Société de transport de Montréal (STM) a élaboré une formation visant à faciliter l’utilisation des transports en commun par des personnes ayant des limitations fonctionnelles motrices. Après deux groupes tests, un groupe focalisé a été réalisé auprès d’experts provenant des milieux communautaires, réadaptation et gouvernemental afin de la bonifier. Au printemps 2019, la formation a été offerte à douze personnes ayant des limitations fonctionnelles motrices. Une équipe interdisciplinaire de chercheurs a réalisé l’évaluation. Avant la formation, les participants ont d’abord été évalués concernant leurs connaissances du réseau de transport ainsi qu’à l’égard de leurs objectifs et capacités de déplacements. Après la formation de sept heures comprenant des activités théoriques et pratiques puis d’un bref entraînement individuel, les personnes devaient documenter douze trajets faits de manière autonome à l’aide d’un carnet de voyage afin de connaître les effets de la formation/entraînement dans leur utilisation du transport régulier. Finalement, après avoir effectué leurs déplacements, leurs points de vue ont été recueillis à l’aide d’entrevues individuelles. Les résultats de la recherche indiquent que la mise en place d’un programme de formation et d’entraînement à l’utilisation des réseaux de bus et de métro accessibles vient augmenter l’utilisation du transport régulier et facilite la participation sociale. Ce projet démontre toute l’importance des exercices pratiques, des mises en situation, de planification des déplacements, de la résolution de problèmes et de la défense de ses droits comme usager du réseau de transport régulier.

Removing Ableist Barriers in Nursing Education: Clinical Essential Requirements

The current approach to clinical placement training for nurses excludes students with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to introduce a four-step model for nursing programs to identify clinical essential requirements – specific skills and competencies students must gain during placement. Engaging this four-step model will allow educators to identify how essential requirements can be achieved in a variety of ways, and thus can involve accommodations. It will also allow for the identification of which essential requirements cannot be accommodated and must be demonstrated in a prescribed manner due to impacting the nature or integrity of the task. Analyzing clinical essential requirements using this framework will create a consistent and defensible method to determine the flexibility or inflexibility of clinical tasks. The framework provided requires a collaborative process including key experts, nursing students and nurses with disabilities to comprehensively address the challenges clinical environments pose to inclusiveness.

Challenges Encountered by Newcomers with Disabilities in Canada

Through a secondary data analysis of administrative data of the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) between 2003 and 2013, we aim to understand the interlocking challenges encountered by newcomers with disabilities in Canada that contribute to this population’s financial hardship. Our findings show that newcomers with disabilities on ODSP were more likely to have post-secondary education, to be older adults, to be married, common-law, and to be female who were divorced, separated, or widowed as compared to Canadian-born recipients, who were more likely to be less educated, younger, single and male. The ratio of Canadian-born to newcomer recipients on the ODSP was high between 2003 and 2013, indicating that the latter were under-represented on the program. Implications for this under-representation support future research to examine the full integration and participation of newcomers with disabilities in Canada.

From the Comfort of Your Own Couch: Is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s You Can’t Ask That an Educational Documentary, or a 21st century Freak Show?

This interrogation begins with a question — Is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series, You Can’t Ask That, an educational documentary, or instead, is the series a 21st-century version of the freak show? The answer, as can be said about most discussions pertaining to disability, is not a simple binary. Although the series can be lauded for creating a public space for the experience of persons with disabilities to be heard in the world, the framing of disability in the series is fraught with ableism.

Disability on Film: An Exploration of Film Codes’ Obstructiveness in City Lights and Children of a Lesser God

Looking at two films that center upon a sensory disability (Chaplin’s City Lights and Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God), I propose that despite many gestures of sensitivity, these films reinforce an othering of the non-normative subject through conventional film codes and conventions. For example, in Haines’ film, the protagonist James Leeds (William Hurt) delivers a lecture on facing his deaf students so that they can read his lips. However, this scene is shot with his back turned away from us (the viewer). Rather than presenting an instance of irony, moments like this reinforce notions of normativity. Specifically, it’s the mechanism(s) behind and within film production that reinforce problematic notions of “normality” while trying to trump them.

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said, to Talk of Many Things: Wheelchair Securement Spaces on Commercial Airlines

Air travel poses special problems for people who use wheelchairs either periodically or consistently (wheelchair users). The wheelchair is, to some extent, an extension of the wheelchair user’s bodily autonomy. Personal dignity would be enhanced, and injury and discomfort would be reduced, if a traveling wheelchair user were allowed to remain in his or her own wheelchair for the duration of the flight. Although no law or regulation currently requires that option, groundwork has been laid in both case law and statutes that could lead to such a result. To be sure, safety and cost are paramount issues and must be adequately addressed. Some technological concerns have already been resolved and others are the subject of promising developments. Lobbyist groups are actively campaigning and, as a result, some airlines have shown interest in the proposal. The goal of in-cabin use of personal wheelchairs is achievable, but the process is likely to be incremental. During this period of COVID-19 pandemic-related disruption in the airline industry, both mainline and regional carriers should benefit from the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction resulting in technical and business innovations. The catalyst needed to move the research and development process along at a faster pace might be a contest with some sort of reward such as has been used to foster other aeronautical innovations.

They See Me Rollin’, They Hatin’

Aubrey Graham, more commonly known as hip-hop performer Drake, presents himself as a man of contradiction—a lover and a fighter, sensitive but hard, successful but humble. Despite this subjective work, designed to present a complex embodiment of an artistic and financial success, the discourse of Graham online is often underpinned by suspicion and derision that seeks to redefine him as a pretender who is unworthy of the status he claims. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Wheelchair Drake” memetic cluster, which uses an old Degrassi: The Next Generation promotional image of Graham sitting on a wheelchair, combined with humorous juxtaposition of rap lyrics, to critique Graham’s status as both a performer and a Black man. In various Wheelchair Drake memes, physical impairment becomes a living metaphor for a spoiled identity; the memes argue that, just like ableist imaginations of physically disabled people, Graham is doomed to a life of impotence and dependency. Built upon a sample of 583 user-generated images, coded into 9 thematic groups, this article excavates the latticed discourses of masculinity, disability and race that animate the Wheelchair Drake meme and consider the ways that this memetic cluster subjects Aubrey Graham to the strictures of ableist hegemonic masculinity.

“He’s Adorable”: Representations of People with Dwarfism in Family Guy

This paper examines how people with dwarfism1 are represented in the American animated sitcom Family Guy. Using autocritical discourse analysis, this paper reflects on my own response, as a person with dwarfism, to scenes featuring characters with dwarfism. Whilst the show has been criticised for its controversial humour, this paper argues that the show actually exposes negative social attitudes that people with dwarfism encounter from other members of the public while refraining from encouraging stereotypes of dwarfism. The paper builds upon Fink’s (2013) suggestion that animated comedies are a source of both humour and social commentary. This paper suggests that Family Guy has the potential to challenge social attitudes towards people with dwarfism and the way they are perceived in society through directing the humour towards those who mock them as opposed to those with dwarfism. However, how the scenes are interpreted depends on the audience, which can be related to Hall’s (1993) reception theory.

Teaching Disability Studies Together: The Importance of Having Instructors with Labels of Intellectual Disabilities

This short commentary has two goals: 1) to share the unique co-teaching experience of two disabled instructors, one of whom has a label of intellectual disability, and 2) to discuss how we, as two white disabled men, try to incorporate the principles of disability justice in our efforts to disrupt bodymind hierarchies within and outside the university classroom and to share some of the resources we use.