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

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.​

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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]).​

 

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. ​

 

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.​

 

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.​

 

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.

 

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.

 

It's definitely written in I am very smart dialect.

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