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Critical Disability Studies and the State
Full text linkLiat Ben-Moshe’s Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, and Linda Steele’s Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion offer distinct critical perspectives on the law and by extension, the State. This essay offers some reflections on the implications for future research in Critical Disability Studies on the State and its relation to disability. Here it is argued that there is scope for a widened analysis of, firstly, what exactly the State is from the perspective of disability; secondly, the distinct role of the State in participating in the construction of disability as a form of social oppression; and finally, the tactical problem posed by the State, as both agent of violence against people with disability and a potential vehicle for structural change
Social Reproduction, Feminism and the Law: Ships in the Night Passing Each Other
Full text linkIn this essay, I consider the vexed relationship between feminist legal scholarship and social reproduction theory (SRT). I offer an overview of Anglo-American feminist legal scholarship on care/reproductive labour and then reflections on an agenda for the study of the laws of social reproduction by incorporating critical legal, legal realist and socio-legal approaches to women’s reproductive labour. In the process, I hope to articulate an agenda for materialist legal feminism drawing on SRT that offers a critique of care discourse (which has had a significant impact on legal scholarship) alongside sharpening a feminist legal agenda for redistributive politics
Social Reproduction and Depletion
Full text linkSocial reproduction is not costless. When unrecognised, valorised but not valued, social reproduction leads to depletion of those who care. Building on the arguments of feminist international political economists, I examine the importance of taking the work of care seriously. Depletion through social reproduction occurs when resources for social reproduction fall below a threshold of sustainability over time. To know the intensity and extensity of depletion allows us to reveal not only the distress – physical, emotional/mental and social - but also to strategise towards reversing depletion
Research Champions: mixed methods evaluation of an interdisciplinary programme for community nurses and allied health professionals to build research capacity
Full text linkAims: to evaluate the Research Champions programme and learn what practitioners perceived as key challenges/benefits; to identify measurable outcomes; and to identify ways of increasing programme uptake.
Background: research within healthcare services is a priority, highlighted throughout UK policy and reflected internationally. The one-year programme was designed to enable nurses, midwives and allied health professionals to develop their practice by learning about research as part of practice development.
Design: mixed methods longitudinal: questionnaires/focus groups with practitioners and their managers.
Methods: Practitioners in three cohorts (2018-21) were asked to complete baseline and post-programme questionnaires; managers were asked to complete post-programme questionnaires; practitioners in the third cohort participated in focus groups. The research facilitator tracked practitioners’ progress for evidence of measurable outcomes. Qualitative data was analysed thematically, underpinned by a realist approach, with strategies to maximise rigour. Reporting complies with the COREQ qualitative checklist.
Results: Twenty-seven (of 31) practitioners completed the pre-programme questionnaire, 19 the post-programme questionnaire; and 13 (of 29) managers completed their questionnaire. Measurable outcomes included Masters degree, research internships, conference presentations, further research projects and promotion. Nine practitioners participated in two focus groups. Three themes were identified. Aspirations and challenges reflected tension between wanting to develop their professional practice using research while negotiating barriers. Coming together, learning together concerned the importance of time to reflect and develop research knowledge/skills, alongside developing confidence to innovate practice. Moving forward, maximising impact evidenced how the programme was a steppingstone to further professional and service development and transforming culture.
Conclusion: Practitioners’ aspirations spanned individual, service and organisational goals. This introductory programme provided the first step to further clinical-academic opportunities for the most capable and motivated practitioners. Key mechanisms included developing research knowledge/skills and the confidence to translate learning into practice. Immediate gains included practitioners sharing their knowledge, skills and enthusiasm for research with colleagues. Medium to longer term gains included changes in clinical practice with direct patient benefit, developing a research network, ongoing research activities and embarking on a clinical-academic pathway
Postcolonial Dynamics in Pro- and Anti-Trans Activism in the United Kingdom and Ireland
No full textThis paper examines the postcolonial relationship between the United Kingdom and Ireland through the lens of the discourse around transgender rights and anti-trans activism. This debate has spilled over from the social, political, and media spaces of the larger jurisdiction into that of the smaller and has provoked a backlash from grassroots Irish feminists who are outraged by trans exclusion. In return, organisations have sprung up in Ireland to protest against trans-inclusive law and policy, sparking debate over their provenance and membership. These debates have featured nationalist and postcolonial motifs including the Irish language and iconography of Irish revolutionaries, as well as the Suffragettes in Britain. As the two sides contest to be seen as the “true” Irish feminism, the paper concludes with an examination of the lives and work of the historical women invoked by both sides. In doing so, the paper attempts to refute the claims of anti-trans actors to an Irish tradition
DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (Eileen R. Tabios)
No full textThis review looks at Indigenous futurisms inherent in this slipstream novel by a Filipina author. The Indigenous value of "kapwa" informs the structure and content of this experiemental narrative work that includes embedded poetry, literary theory, history, political history and theory, and more. The author suggests how an alternative view of time allows for integration and synthesis rather than fragmentation
An introduction to Clinical Research for Health and Social Care Professionals (2022), by Ario Santini and Kenneth Eaton.
Full text linkArio Santini and Kenneth A. Eaton (2022) have created a valuable introduction to clinical research, which introduces readers to the topic as well as guiding them through the steps required to produce and publish clinical research. This book provides a broad and thorough understanding but acts more so as a gateway to the world of clinical research. This is a review of the book
Disability, Criminal Justice, and Abolition: Recognizing and Remedying Law’s Violence
Full text linkIn this short essay, I explore how Liat Ben-Moshe’s Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition and Linda Steele’s Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion provide helpful analytical frameworks for legal practitioners, students, and scholars committed to responding to law’s role in producing and legitimating violence against historically marginalized groups, and in particular disabled people. This essay surfaces three key insights that Ben-Moshe and Steele provide legal scholars, practitioners, and students: the importance of the intersectional method, critical analysis on how law is complicit in ongoing forms of disability-based subordination, particularly within the criminal legal system, and the imperative of the abolitionist ethic as a necessary response to redressing forms of state violence, including in particular, legally sanctioned harms to disabled people
Marginalisations and Redefinitions of Kinship in Contemporary Cuba
Full text linkThis article examines the marginalisations and redefinitions taking place in kinship relations and the resources that persons in a precarious social position draw on to cope with exclusions in the context of large-scale social, legal, political, and economic change. In situations of global and local transformation, people may become marginalised in their social relations for various reasons, but in the margins, they can also find resources to alleviate or redefine such experiences. Such processes are complexly shaped by intersectional differences and inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, and age. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Cuba, a country that is currently undergoing extensive structural changes, this article focuses on the marginalisations of kinship through the ethnographic story of an elderly woman and her kin encountering unexpected exclusions in their relationships. As Cuba transforms from a socialist, egalitarian society into a new social order increasingly guided by the privileges of money, social relations are redefined in terms of shifts in understandings of marginality. In the margins, we find new arrangements of both discrimination and support, but the political potential of such processes is ambiguous and culturally and historically contingent
"In the Shallows of a Lake that Goes on Forever": Reconstructing Native Becoming in Stephen Graham Jones's Mapping the Interior
Full text linkDistanced from kin, land, and stories that might otherwise orient the narrator’s reconstruction of his adolescence, Stephen Graham Jones's Mapping the Interior (2017) offers the mindscape of Junior, who readers encounter as a twelve year-old boy sleepwalking his way toward becoming the absence his father before him eventually became, but who nevertheless feels what inhabits him “squirming” within (12). Through this sleepwalking existence, coupled with the narrator’s father’s appearance-in-death as what was impossible for him in life, Jones indexes the conditions within which becoming “Indian” in the context of settler colonialism is akin to becoming dead, “tethered” to a “cyclical” story of emergence, removal, internalization, and repetition that Jones articulates viscerally through chrysalides and metamorphosis. Imagined through a narrative of perpetual paternal absence, Jones’s emphasis on life cycles conveys his critique of settler chronobiopolitics, or the governance of life through the governance of time. When what there is to inherit appears as a tradition of assimilation-as-death and death-as-sleepwalking, Jones suggests, one knows the life cycle already (106). The cynical detachment of Jones's narrator, though, is a vehicle through which Mapping reimagines the enduring effects of dispossession and the affective violence of erasure as occluding but not eliminating the coherence and endurance of peoplehood. In the afterword to Mongrels (2016), Jones writes "if you wrap yourself in the right story, everything makes sense" (7). Throughout Mapping, Jones wraps Junior in what might be called a Blackfeet surround of place and story, an alternative background against which readers might begin to reimagine the life cycle to which Junior appears tethered. In this essay, I read Mapping's contrasting backgrounds as producing a critique of discussions of Native masculinity that link resistance to becoming something that lies in one's blood, pointing instead toward the fact that recognizing what it is one might become depends on the stories and memories to which one has access. Mapping the Interior calls for different stories than those in which Native men appear already marked for death. Jones suggests that these different stories are not found in “tradition,” nor in “blood,” but in the way the water in a kitchen sink might lead to the “shallows of a lake that goes on forever” (103)
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