Bodies 'locked up': intersections of disability and race in Australian immigration

Between 2005 and 2006 it came to be known that over 200 people had been wrongfully detained in Australian immigration detention centres, of whom 13 were people with a disability. A review of the subsequent Commonwealth Ombudsman Reports into the wrongful detentions exposed an organizational culture in which othered voices were discredited and disregarded, an over-willingness to detain a person and a lack of proper oversight of these powers. This paper explores these reports and argues that proper investigation needs to go beyond organizational culture and to look also at historical, social, political and cultural forces shaping Australia's use of immigration detention. The authors propose that the intersection of disability and race leaves people vulnerable to human rights violations primarily because this is also the intersection of both racial and rational prejudices of the dominant hegemony. © 2009 Taylor & Francis

Improving education inclusion for disabled peoplein Indonesia

[Extract] December 3 has become a day of action and celebration for furthering the rights of people with disabilities around the world. An Indonesia-Australia collaboration has looked into whether Indonesian schools, including Islamic institutions, open their doors to disabled people. The Indonesian government has made efforts to promote accessible and inclusive education for people with disabilities. These students depend on government and community commitment to the equality and participation of people with disabilities

Rights, Justice and Flourishing: The Uses and Limitations of Human Rights

from hell,” this is a task for which the whole discourse of human rights is eminently well suited. ... individuals can determine means that the state has little to no role in 4 RIGHTS, JUSTICE AND FLOURISHING: THE USES AND LIMITATIONS

'At What Cost?': Indigenous Australians' Experiences of Applying for Disability Income Support (Disability Support Pension)

The Disability Support Pension (DSP) is the primary income support payment by Australians living with a disability of workforce age, but are not attached to the labour market in a significant manner. The Disability Support Pension has been a central component of the Australian social security system. Since the early 2000s, the Australian Government has put in place a series of changes to the DSP eligibility criteria and the assessment process. Despite major changes, there has been limited attention of the implications persons with disabilities, and even less for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with disability. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians experience approximately twice the rate of disability as non-Indigenous Australians. This report examines the impact to Indigenous Australians in the community applying for the DSP and service providers who ensure they have appropriate support and access to apply for the DSP. This report draws directly on data from interviews and focus groups conducted in four jurisdictions across Australia between March 2017 and September 2018 with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who self-identify as living with disability and have applied or are in the process of applying for the DSP. The data from community members is augmented with interviews and focus groups with medical practitioners and non-medical service providers who have high levels of contact with these community members as well as representatives from Local Government. A number of recommendations to improve the current process are outlined

Exploring disability

Book review of: Exploring disability, Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (2010) Polity Press, Cambridge, UK; ISBN: 978-0-7456-3486-9, 342 pages, $28.9

Surviving the Assault? The Australian Disability Movement and the Neoliberal Workfare State

This article provides an analysis of the key areas of struggle for the Australian disability movement during the Howard years of government. After providing a brief overview of the Australian disability movement and its historical development, we then move to situate the struggles of the Australian disability movement within the broader context of welfare to work, one of the central tenets of neoliberal social policy restructuring. From here, three sites of struggle emerge that have been central to the Australian disability movement's struggles for representation, recognition and redistribution and principally include state restructuring of disability open labour market supports, state legitimation of disability sheltered workshops and, finally, the pensioner-categorization of disability within social security law and policy

Imagined Bodies: architects and their constructions of later life

This article comprises a sociological analysis of how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life and the extent to which they engage empathetically with users. Drawing on interviews with architectural professionals based in the United Kingdom, we offer insight into the ways in which architects envisage the bodies of those who they anticipate will populate their buildings. Deploying the notions of ‘body work’ and ‘the body multiple’, our analysis reveals how architects imagined a variety of bodies in nuanced ways. These imagined bodies emerge as they talked through the practicalities of the design process. Moreover, their conceptions of bodies were also permeated by prevailing ideologies of caring: although we found that they sought to resist dominant discourses of ageing, they nevertheless reproduced these discourses. Architects’ constructions of bodies are complicated by the collaborative nature of the design process, where we find an incessant juggling between the competing demands of multiple stakeholders, each of whom anticipate other imagined bodies and seek to shape the design of buildings to meet their requirements. Our findings extend a nascent sociological literature on architecture and social care by revealing how architects participate in the shaping of care for later life as ‘body workers’, but also how their empathic aspirations can be muted by other imperatives driving the marketisation of care

Unchaining disability law : global considerations, limitations and possibilities in the Global South and East

Pons, Lord, and Stein’s article entitled “Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity,”1 offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the necessity to legally frame and approach crimes against persons with disabilities across the globe as crimes against humanity (CAH). National public inquiries examining the systematic violations against persons with disabilities repeatedly demonstrate how, despite efforts to report such heinous crimes, these violations remain largely ignored and nearly always unprosecuted.2 In the Global South and East, violations may be accentuated as complex historical, economic, (geo)political, cultural, ideological, spiritual, and even religious beliefs come into play alongside shifting landscapes of civil unrest, war, and state militarization. Within such contexts, legal measures for the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly for minority communities, meet extraordinary barriers. In this essay, we identify a number of core issues that constrain the possibilities of investigation and prosecution of CAH committed against persons with disabilities living in the Global South and East. Even though such laws are largely grounded in practices and institutions of the Global North, this essay emphasizes the need to ensure that accountability efforts for CAH perpetrated against persons with disability are rigorous in their design, robust in their application, and recognize the heterogeneity of persons with disability on a global scale