The use of photovoice with people with intellectual disabilities: reflections,challenges and opportunities

Photovoice is part of the growing use of participatory research approaches with people with intellectual disabilities. In this paper we explore the process, opportunities and challenges associated with the use of photovoice with people with intellectual disabilities, illustrated through a research project entitled ‘This Is Me’. Photovoice requires researchers to share power and control in the research process and to tolerate uncertainty. Large investments in time and money are also required. These challenges, however, are outweighed by the benefits of the use of photovoice with people with intellectual disabilities. Photovoice creates a space where people with intellectual disabilities can meaningfully participate and exert control in the research process, and as such is an empowering experience. As a participatory research approach, photovoice is accessible and offers the opportunity for people with intellectual disabilities to develop new skills, confidence and experience inclusiveness in their own terms.     

Managing cohesion in transnational organizations: an introduction

Aesthetic approaches seek to enrich knowledge about the ‘sensible’ aspects of experience. The ‘aesthetic dimension’ of shipboard organizational life is evoked and co‐created through multiple aesthetic categories such as the agogic, the sacred, and the sublime rendered through multiple sensory experiences of life aboard. A researcher and sailor‐informant co‐authored aesthetic reading contributes to a growing niche of aesthetic‐based research within organization studies. Our article explores collaboration as an important element of the aesthetic project. Possibilities for future aesthetic inquiries are also considered.     

It takes a sister: sisterhood and Black womanhood in families of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities

This study explores the sibling relationships of Black women with sisters who have intellectual and developmental disabilities in the southeast United States including Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The researchers used disability/critical race theory to understand the perceptions and stigmas associated with disability relating to social, cultural, and psychological structures within sibling relationships. Results were captured in four themes: cultural perceptions of family and extended kin; sibling relationships; beliefs about the self as a sister; and siblings’ identities. The findings from this study will contribute to research in disability studies by providing a better understanding of the intersections of identities and the familial experiences of diverse families.     

The evolution of interorganizational trust in cross‐sector collaborations: Two comparative cases from China

This study views interorganizational trust as a dynamic process and examines it in two cross‐sector collaborations in community development. Based on in‐depth case study, we conceptualize the evolution of interorganizational trust into four distinct stages: initial propensity, boundary spanning, diffusion and normalization. The findings show that sustainable cross‐sector collaboration requires the full evolution of interorganizational trust. The findings also highlight the importance of internal motivation and the participation of third parties. In addition, while formal rules contribute to rational trust, informal rules arising from interactive experiences can complement formal rules and promote emotional trust.     

Dementia,disability rights and disablism: understanding the social position of people living with dementia

This article considers the recent history and consequences of positioning people living with dementia in the realms of disability, disablism and disability rights. The geo-political focus is the United Kingdom and neighbouring resource-rich nations in the Global North. The first section examines the growing trend of identifying ‘dementia’ with ‘disability’, a trend fuelled by the expansion of dementia-related activism and research. The second section focuses on how researchers who have published in Disability & Society and other journals have applied the social model of disability to individuals living with dementia. The third section discusses three conceptual challenges that lie ahead for those who choose to research and theorise the dementia/disability connection. These challenges concern: theorising dementia as disability; understanding intersectionality in dementia contexts; and understanding ‘abuse’ in dementia contexts.     

A review of the challenges of achieving the goals in the African Plan of Action for people with disabilities in Nigeria

The Plan of Action (POA) document was produced at the Pan-African Conference on African Decade of Persons with Disabilities attended by representatives of all African countries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (4–7 February 2002). The POA is aimed at implementing priority activities to enhance the services provided to Africans with disabilities during the decade by formulating and implementing meaningful policies and programmes, creating national disability service coordination committees, supporting community-based service delivery, developing poverty alleviation programmes, enhancing preventive programmes, and promoting positive attitudes and awareness of the needs of people with disabilities. While the goals of the POA are noble, evidence raises concerns about the actions so far taken by the Nigerian Government to ensure the implementation of the programme for the benefit of citizens with disabilities. Obstacles to implementing the provisions of the POA document and the implications for strategies that could facilitate the achievement of the goals of the POA are discussed.     

Issues of collaboration,representation, meaning and emotions: utilising participant-led visual diaries to capture the everyday lives of people in mid to later life

In recent years there has been an increasing use of visual methods in ageing research. There are, however, limited reflections and critical explorations of the implications of using visual methods in research with people in mid to later life. This paper examines key methodological complexities when researching the daily lives of people as they grow older and the possibilities and limitations of using participant-generated visual diaries. The paper will draw on our experiences of an empirical study, which included a sample of 62 women and men aged 50 years and over with different daily routines. Participant-led photography was drawn upon as a means to create visual diaries, followed by in-depth, photo-elicitation interviews. The paper will critically reflect on the use of visual methods for researching the daily lives of people in mid to later life, as well as suggesting some wider tensions within visual methods that warrant attention. First, we explore the extent to which photography facilitates a ‘collaborative’ research process; second, complexities around capturing the ‘everydayness’ of daily routines are explored; third, the representation and presentation of ‘self’ by participants within their images and interview narratives is examined; and, finally, we highlight particular emotional considerations in visualising daily life.     

Beyond friendship: the nature and meaning of close personal relationships as perceived by people with learning disabilities

Many people with learning disabilities aspire to having friends and to forming close relationships. Often the latter are discouraged, but for those who enter into such a relationship little is known about the meaning and value it brings to their lives. The aim of this study was to gain an insight into the close relationships of eight couples with learning disabilities using a combination of dyadic and one-to-one interviews. Data collection and analysis was informed and guided by the core principles of grounded theory. Five significant types of benefits were identified from having close personal relationships, namely: comradeship, a sense of contentment, availability of mutual support, coping with the ups and downs of relationships, and a continuing commitment. Service providers could do more to facilitate the formation of close meaningful relationships, and strategies for doing this need to be identified and evaluated.     

Labeling albinism: language and discourse surrounding people with albinism in Tanzania

This article is based on a qualitative study that set out to analyze the labels and terms attached to 28 people affected by albinism in villages in Kilolo district, Tanzania. Even though national and international attention to killings of people with albinism has attempted to improve general knowledge of albinism and reduce discrimination, most of the community members within the study had little knowledge of the (bio)medical explanations for albinism and tended to marginalize people with albinism. Framed within a wider moral discourse on illness, disability and socially appropriate behavior, albinism is mostly considered to be God’s will or the consequence of past misdeeds within the family, and many of the existing labels for people with albinism express such ideas.     

Transition from school for youths with a disability: issues and challenges

Australian research has demonstrated that students with a disability are more likely to remain out of the full‐time workforce. These research findings have been the catalyst for a call for a comprehensive career development and transition planning approach for all students with disabilities in schools as well as for employers to rethink the role of people with disabilities in the workforce. In the Australian context the transition from school for individuals with a disability is complicated by a disparate and fragmented group of service agencies providing a range of services, including employment, supported accommodation, recreation and leisure pursuits, as well as training and placement, along with, at times, a deep‐seated prejudice towards people with disabilities in the market place. This paper reviews a number of issues and challenges confronting individuals with a disability making the transition from school to the post‐school environment.     

Doing disability research in a Southern context: challenges and possibilities

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project (DEPP) aims at exploring the role of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poverty. A central focus of the research is to engage with the young people with disabilities themselves and to understand how they construed their lives and experiences. This paper discusses three issues which are of central concern to the project: identification of the sample group, appropriateness of the research methods and, finally, an examination of the assumptions underpinning the research process.     

Enacting everyday feminist collaborations: Reflexive becoming,proactive improvisation and co‐learning partnerships

We trace back our own multi‐year teaching and writing collaboration in academia to theorize feminist collaboration. Drawing from feminist theories and our autoethnographic reflections, we surface three metaphorical processes that constitute feminist collaboration. We consider feminist collaboration as: (i) reflexive becoming, that is, feminist collaborators constantly make sense of what counts as feminist as the group and context evolve; (ii) proactive improvisation, that is, feminist collaborators collectively strive for everyday transformations within situated constraints; and (iii) co‐learning partnerships, that is, feminist collaborators relate to one another in ways that uphold commitments to reflexivity, equity and care. Enacting these processes are fraught with tensions that intertwine with one another to constrain and enable feminist collaboration. We conclude the article by calling for continued theorization and engagement with feminist collaboration.     

Education of people with disabilities: a capability-context framework of culture

People with disabilities find themselves at the margins of ideas on education in the rights-based and the agency-focused frameworks (the capability approach). This article socially situates the rights-based framework to extend agency as an educational opportunity to make it participatory in cross-cultural contexts, and individually locates the agency-focused framework to enhance agency as multi-dimensional educational experience-outcome journeys across cultural contexts. This extended scope of rights and enhanced capacity of agency is advanced as the capability-context framework of culture. The framework focuses on analytically distinct yet connected emerging agents with capabilities of both dialogical discourses (retrospective reflexivity – macro-mechanisms) and dialectic narratives (bounded participation – micro-structures), which can provide access to deep social structures, and their many ways of being (micro-mechanisms) and specific ways of doing (macro-structures) that enable, but also disable the social choices of people with disabilities, to open new possibilities for them, and for all across contexts.     

Unmet health care needs of people with disabilities: population level evidence

The present study examined population level data on unmet needs for adults with physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities, using the National Population Health Survey. The study revealed that disabled adults (aged 20–64) reported more than three times as many unmet health care needs as their non‐disabled counterparts. Even after controlling for the effects of age, gender and poor health, disability had a significant effect on the perception of unmet needs, particularly disabilities associated with pain, hearing impairment and emotional problems. The greatest deterrent to receiving needed services among individuals with disabilities was cost. Despite being publicly funded and thereby presumably equally accessible to all, the health care system in Canada fails to meet the needs of some of its most vulnerable constituents – adults with disabilities.     

Through a filtered lens: unauthorized picture-taking of people with dwarfism in public spaces

People with dwarfism often encounter discrimination in their daily interactions with strangers. Staring, harassment and infantilization are some of the behaviours they have reported to encounter. Through two qualitative research studies conducted in 2013 and 2015/16 it was revealed that people with dwarfism also experience strangers taking unauthorized pictures of them. This article explores this phenomenon in depth, utilizing the perspective of individuals who have experienced it first hand and analysing the relevant socio-historical influences. These include the history of the photographic exploitation of ‘abnormal’ bodies, and the cultural construction of a ‘dwarf’ as an object of entertainment. This article engages gaze theories in gender and race and ethnicity studies as well as a discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of the ‘panopticon’, positing that the advent of the cell-phone camera in the twenty-first century has altered how ‘abnormal’ bodies are recorded within oppressive ideological beliefs.     

Employment situation and life changes for people with disabilities: evidence from Nepal

In this study we attempt to bring attention to the situation of people with disabilities in the developing world by focusing on the labor market of Nepal. Utilizing a unique dataset collected from people with hearing, physical, and visual impairments through questionnaire-based interview methods, we compare across employment based on type of impairments and education levels to identify variation in occupational choices, as well as examining any positive life changes brought by employment. Results indicated that people with hearing, physical or visual impairments often dominated a specific employment sector. Numbers of people with physical, hearing and visual impairments were respectively large in the non-governmental organization sector, restaurants, and local schools. In addition to income, greater social inclusion, respect in the community, more friends, increased confidence, and discovering the new abilities were some of the positive life changes experienced by employees with disabilities.     

Looking inside the bag of tools: creating research encounters with parents with an intellectual disability

This paper examines the development of fieldwork methodology in a study that investigated the parenting experiences and parent support needs of a group of parents with an intellectual disability. It considers the ways in which the original planning for the project changed as the fieldwork unfolded, requiring adaptations to our methodological expectations and in the process deepening our understanding of the phenomena we were studying and reinforcing for us the importance of relationships in fieldwork‐based research. Three themes in particular are considered that became central to this research: research relationships; safety for participants/positioning of the researcher; suspending assumptions about impairment and disability and influences on life experiences.     

Workers with disabilities and the challenges of emotional labour

This paper explores the implications of emotional labour for workers with disabilities, drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 59 respondents who had disabilities and who worked in service sector occupations. The analysis illustrates that employer demands for emotional labour may prove difficult for workers with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric diagnoses, learning difficulties and physical impairments. Analysis also points to the ways in which the non‐accommodating nature of many workplaces often forces workers with disabilities to engage in ‘extra’ emotion work in the interests of fitting in and concealing/ downplaying their impairments.     

The employment situation of people with disabilities in Lebanon: challenges and opportunities

This article presents the findings of a study on the employment situation of people with disabilities in a rural region in Lebanon. The study was conducted as one of the activities of a community development project that saw the establishment of a job centre for people with disabilities. The majority of the study's 200 paricipants were unemployed, and many had never been employed. Other participants were mostly self-employed, with many of them working from home. The article discusses obstacles to finding and keeping a job and ends with recommendations for change at the level of community intervention, policy and research.     

Identity challenges and social experiences of higher education students with disabilities in Slovenia

This article focuses on the experiences and experiencing of disability, policies of self-understanding, and the life plans and aspirations of students with disabilities. The article draws on the results of a qualitative survey of students with disabilities taking courses in various faculties of the University of Ljubljana. The results show that students with disabilities are able to reshape their identities in a way that does not consist of the disability experienced, but is independent of it, and they are able to accept their disability as the reality of life without losing their own purpose of living and life plans. This experience is a significant part of the identity formation of people with disabilities, and the social experience of people with disabilities strengthens their selfhood while also producing new responses and challenges to contemporary issues of identity formation and identity policies.