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Community participation and inclusion: people with disabilities defining their place. Milner, Kelly

Discussion in 'General disability topics and advocacy' started by WillowJ, Apr 24, 2019.

  1. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    Paul Milner & Berni Kelly (2009) Community participation and inclusion: people with disabilities defining their place, Disability & Society, 24:1, 47-62, DOI: 10.1080/09687590802535410

    Disability‐related public policy currently emphasises reducing the number of people experiencing exclusion from the spaces of the social and economic majority as being the pre‐eminent indicator of inclusion.

    Twenty‐eight adult, New Zealand vocational service users collaborated in a participatory action research project to develop shared understandings of community participation.

    Analysis of their narratives suggests that spatial indices of inclusion are quiet in potentially oppressive ways about the ways mainstream settings can be experienced by people with disabilities and quiet too about the alternative, less well sanctioned communities to which people with disabilities have always belonged.

    Participants identified five key attributes of place as important qualitative antecedents to a sense of community belonging.

    The potential of these attributes and other self‐authored approaches to inclusion are explored as ways that people with disabilities can support the policy objective of effecting a transformation from disabling to inclusive communities.

    Free full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687590802535410?src=recsys
     
  2. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    The less palatable reality for many people with disabilities is that they often take significant psychological and sometimes physical risk being in many mainstream contexts because – as Reid and Bray (1998 Reid, P. and Bray, A. 1998. Real jobs: The perspectives of workers with learning disabilities. Disability & Society, 13: 229–39. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]) observed, their spatial and economic inclusion also includes the ‘normality’ of discrimination, abuse, intolerance and more subtle forms of personal exclusion (Clement 2006 Clement, T. 2006. “What’s the vision?”. In From ideology to reality: Current issues in implementation of intellectual disability policy. Proceedings of the roundtable on intellectual disability policy, Edited by: Bigby, C., Fyffe, C. and Mansell, J. Bundoora, , Australia: La Trobe University. [Google Scholar]; Hall 2004 Hall, E. 2004. Social geographies of learning disability: Narratives of exclusion and inclusion. Area, 36(3): 298–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]; Reid and Bray 1998 Reid, P. and Bray, A. 1998. Real jobs: The perspectives of workers with learning disabilities. Disability & Society, 13: 229–39. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]).

    The second, unspoken reality is that framing community participation and inclusion as occurring only within the communities where people with disabilities tend to be absent blinds us to the value of the multiple communities to which they have always belonged (Wilson 2006 Wilson, E. 2006. “Defining and measuring the outcomes of Inclusive community for people with disability, their families and the communities with whom they engage”. In From ideology to reality: Current issues in implementation of intellectual disability policy. Proceedings of the roundtable on intellectual disability policy, Edited by: Bigby, C., Fyffe, C. and Mansell, J. Bundoora, , Australia: La Trobe University. [Google Scholar]).

    Limiting the ‘appropriate’ contexts for inclusion to spaces of the social and economic majority perpetuates the assimilative logic of antecedent social reform and places legitimate community beyond the experiences that shape the values and social practices of people with disabilities. ... (Hall 2004 Hall, E. 2004. Social geographies of learning disability: Narratives of exclusion and inclusion. Area, 36(3): 298–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]).
     
    Andy likes this.
  3. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    By locating community both beyond of the ambit of their ordinary lives and beyond interpersonal intimacy, adult service users’ initial reading of ‘community’ is at odds with the broader, societal understanding of the construct. It also failed to acknowledge a quieter valuing of their disabled peers and the people and places they shared.
     
    Andy, adambeyoncelowe and Hutan like this.
  4. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    Experiences of social othering in mainstream contexts punctuated narratives. Everyone had stories of being teased and of experiencing particular community spaces as unwelcoming of, even hostile to, bodily difference....
    ...

    people with disabilities tended to influence each other’s participatory expectations through processes of mentoring and encouragement.
     
    adambeyoncelowe and Andy like this.
  5. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    The most highly valued forms of participation were self‐chosen activities that people undertook with a degree of autonomy....

    Conversely, the absence of control over the timing or form of participation was experienced as demeaning and disabling.
     
  6. Wonko

    Wonko Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    6,674
    Location:
    UK
    Finally, a post in it with words I understand.

    Sorry @WillowJ but I understood none of the preceding posts, the language is beyond me. It sounds like they are trying to sound <something> but saying effectively nothing, certainly communicating nothing, at least to me.
     
    chrisb, MEMarge, rvallee and 4 others like this.
  7. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    26,521
    Location:
    Aotearoa New Zealand
    Yeah, having "paradigm" in a sentence is always a bad sign, in my view, and "paradigmatic understanding" takes obtuseness to another level again. Having "paramountcy of location" in the same sentence, well, that's quite something.

    The authors make good points. It's a shame that they buried them.

    My aunt's view is very much aligned with the Ministry of Social Development's given in that paragraph; she thinks that I need to be physically out in the community. It's hard to make people understand that an online community that I can participate in from my sofa is a reasonable choice, both physically but also because of shared understanding.

    On this forum, most of the time I'm not acutely aware of the limitations imposed by my illness, even though much of the content is about the illness. I was thinking about this a bit today because yesterday out at a meeting, it was tough going just remaining upright. And the issue of CBT and unblinded trials with subjective outcomes was discussed - stuff that we all know and that seems so obvious. It felt quite daunting dealing with well-meaning people who find it easier to believe that CBT cures us by magically reducing inflammation than CBT changes questionnaire answering.

    Sorry, waffle.
     
  8. WillowJ

    WillowJ Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    676
    Journals do love their jargon. It's a known issue in academia that groups are communicating mainly to themselves. I don't have a citation for that right now.

    I am certain that I once read about a paper where someone purposely wrote a bunch of jargon in sentences that made no sense at all, but the conclusion made sense and was popular. It passed peer review and got published. I cannot since find a reference to this paper.
     
    chrisb, MEMarge, Hutan and 4 others like this.
  9. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    12,296
    Location:
    Canada
    It's definitely written in I am very smart dialect.

    Spoiler: actually being smart means speaking with clarity. Unnecessarily obfuscated language does the opposite.
     
  10. NelliePledge

    NelliePledge Moderator Staff Member

    Messages:
    13,142
    Location:
    UK West Midlands
    I spent the last 10 years of my career working on web content for a public sector organisation where we took information written by technical experts aimed at a professional audience as our source and tried to make a version understandable for normal human beings. Luckily for me having studied French to degree level I could draw on my experience of going between languages. These technical and academic writers might all be using English but they might as well be different languages. A simple example was the trouble I had with a guy who wouldn’t sign off an article because we had used home to describe the place people live in because residence was the term in the law we were explaining and home could be misunderstood. :banghead: ETA in the end I told him we would use our editorial control and publish it anyway as his argument wasn’t strong enough so he gave up. The current version still says home.
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2019

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