1st Edition
The Routledge International Handbook of Disability Human Rights Hierarchies
Disability is defined by hierarchy. Regardless of culture or context, persons with disabilities are almost always pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
With the advent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), disability human rights seemingly provided a path forward for tearing down ableist social hierarchies and ensuring that all persons with disabilities everywhere were treated equally. Despite important progress, the disability human rights project not only remains incomplete, but has often created new hierarchies among persons with disabilities themselves or across the human rights it promotes. Certain groups of persons with disabilities have gained new voices while others remain silenced and certain rights are prioritized over others depending on what states, international organizations, or advocates want rather than what those on the ground need most.
This volume was inspired both by the continued need to expose human rights violations against persons with disabilities, but to also explore the nuanced role that hierarchies play in the spread, implementation, and protection of disability human rights. The enjoyment of human rights is not equal nor is the recognition of specific individuals and groups’ rights. In order to change this situation, inequalities across the disability human rights movement must be explored.
Divided into five parts:
- Who counts as disabled?
- Political, social, and cultural context
- Which rights on top, whose rights on bottom?
- Pushed to the periphery in the disability rights movement
- Representations of disability
and comprised of 34 newly-written chapters including case-studies from the Anglophone Caribbean, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Serbia and South Africa, and other countries, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, human rights law and social policy.
Introduction
Part One - Who counts as disabled?
Chapter One - Knowing about Human Rights Situation of Burn Survivors Women of Bangladesh
Jannatul Ferdous Ivy
Chapter Two – Creating a STORM: Working together to fight stigma and stand up for the rights of people with learning disabilities
Lisa Richardson, Michaela Osborne, Christine Burke, Karuna Davies, Adrian Brown, Celia Brown, Paul Davies, Harry Roche and Katrina Scior
Chapter Three – Rethinking the capacities of disabled children from the perspective of new materialism
Radoš Keravica
Chapter Four – A Journey to Realize Autistic’s Right
Rebekah Kintzinger, Stephanie Côté and Ajay Gandhi
Chapter Five – "To tremble, else break": Dismanlting Normative Hierarchies of Chronic Lyme
Pavithra Suresh
Chapter Six – The Balancing Act: Disability at the intersection of minority ethnicity
Stephanie Harvey and Julie Jaye Charles
Chapter Seven – Mental health service users claiming their right to self-advocacy: The journey of "Autoekprosopsi"
Leonardos Skordos, Diakakis Panagiotis, Marini Garyfalia, Athina Fragkouli and Panagiota Fitsiou
Chapter Eight – Developing cultural capacity with people who have profound intellectual disabilities
Nicola Clare Grove, Annie Fergusson, Gillian White, Naomi Hewardine, Karen Bunning, Maureen Phillip, Sue Ledger and Elizabeth Tilley
Chapter Nine – Fighting for the rights of the non-speaking: Typing words to be heard
Nicolas Joncour
Part Two - Political, social, and cultural context
Chapter Ten – Exploring the now and the prospects of the Disability rights movement in Latin America
Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez and Beatriz Miranda Galarza
Chapter Eleven – On the margins while in the midst of conflict – Adults with intellectual disabilities in Northern Ireland and Bosnia Herzegovina
Áine Sperrin
Chapter Twelve – Personal assistance services in Poland during the period of higher education: Paving the way for independent living
Ewa Giermanowska, Mariola Racław and Dorota Szawarska
Chapter Thirteen – Theories of social dominance in group-based hierarchies: Reflections from the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) project in Uruguay
Holly Wescott
Chapter Fourteen – Intellectual Disability and Sexuality in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Communities
Rina B. Pikkel and Chaya Gershuni
Chapter Fifteen – On the Hierarchy of Human Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Higher Education: Capturing the fulfilment of the right to accessibility in Indonesia
Despan Heryansyah and Sahid Hadi
Chapter Sixteen – Violence against women and girls with disabilities in residential institutions in Serbia
Kosana Beker and Biljana Janjic
Chapter Seventeen – Disability and Displacement: Disability Hierarchy Among Refugees and Other Displaced People
Jennifer Ward
Chapter Eighteen – Hierarchy, education and persons with disabilities in Anglophone Caribbean
Senator Floyd Morris
Part Three - Which rights on top, whose rights on bottom?
Chapter Nineteen – Hierarchies of impairment and digital disability rights
Sarah Lewthwaite and Abi James
Chapter Twenty – Communication rights moderated through hierarchies of disability and childhood
Sharynne McLeod and Jessica McLeod
Chapter Twenty-one – Including the voices of persons with intellectual disabilities in academia: Participatory research, education and development in the academic world
Anikó Sándor, Csilla Cserti-Szauer, András Futár and Jan Walmsley
Chapter Twenty-two – Exploring intersectional and ethical feminist perspectives as a possible framework for understanding violence against women with disabilities in Africa with specific reference to forced sterilisation
Adetokunbo Johnson and Karin van Marle
Chapter Twenty-three – Inclusive Education through a Neoliberal lens: The hierarchal differences between rural and urban China
James Hardy and Gaye Tyler-Merrick
Part Four - Pushed to the periphery in the disability rights movement
Chapter Twenty-four – Excluded from disability rights debate: the missed voices of people with speech impairments
Armineh Soorenian
Chapter Twenty-five – Hierarchies of Leadership Within Disability Justice Movements: The Voices of individuals with intellectual disabilities are often left unheard.
Jason Harris, Micah Fialka-Feldman, Megan E. Cartier and Sara Soldovieri
Chapter Twenty-six – Zhenshchiny. Invalidnost’. Feminizm/Women. Disability . Feminism: Claiming Ourselves Against Ableism
Alyona Lyovina, Maria Tselovatova and Philippa Mullins
Chapter Twenty-seven – Two sides of the same coin: Domination of the views of the educated in organisations of the blind in Ghana
Alimata Abdul Karimu
Chapter Twenty-eight – Between the Disability Movement and the Feminist Movement - Intersectional Mobilizations of Women with Disabilities in Haiti
Dominique Masson, Stephen Baranyi and Ilionor Louis
Part Five - Representations of Disability
Chapter Twenty-nine - Reflections of Misperceptions
James Ian
Chapter Thirty – Pirate Island
Elizabeth Mestheneos
Chapter Thirty-one – Disability or Vulnerability: How Courts Distinguish between Physical and Psychosocial Disabilities in an Employment Context
Radina Ugrinova
Chapter Thirty-two – Rooted in Rights – "Women with Disabilities in India and Kenya"
Mildred Omino and Shubha Nagesh
Chapter Thirty-three – Conversation Across Continents on Hierarchies, Human Security and Covid-19
Rosemary Joan Gowran, Eileen Davis, Natasha Layton, Ricky Buchanan, Diane Bell, Jody Lee van Heerden, Sureshkumar Kamalakannan and Deepak Nathan
Chapter Thirty-four – An Invitation to Contemplate: Dialogues about disability hierarchies between South Africa and Scotland
Njabulo Hlongwane, Judith Drake and Jean Cathro
Chapter Thirty-five – Countering Disability Hierarchy with Cross Disability Solidarity
Gabor Gombos and Amita Dhanda
Chapter Thirty-six - Intersecting identities
Elizabeth Hassler
Biography
Stephen J. Meyers is Director of the Center for Global Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He is the author of Civilizing Disability Society: The UN Disability Convention socializing grassroots disabled persons organizations in Nicaragua. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Megan McCloskey is Senior Fellow, Disability Inclusive Development Initiative, International Policy Institute, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
Gabor Petri is postdoctoral researcher at the Democracy Institute, Central European University, Budapest and Honorary Lecturer at the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
