Disability Policy in Comparative Perspective

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Abstract

Governments and societies must find ways to include disabled people, with governments having the responsibility to put forth disability policy. In the study of disability policy, scholars’ objects of inquiry are often changes after legislation takes effect. Hence, the literature on disability policy offers a gradual understanding of how policies in place affect the lives of disabled people for better or for worse. This panel advances the lens on policy effects by paying attention to the underlying ideas and constructs that condition disability policy formulation and how concepts of disability are embedded in the labor market.

Skarstad studies a disability policy making process by interviewing engaged stakeholders in Norway, which shows how individual knowledge and identification with the people and the issue affect the policy making and make up for crucial legitimacy and responsiveness instruments. Candlish reconstructs ideas on disability through critical frames from parliamentary questions in three states, finding that there are strong national patterns in the construction of disability, with a divide between a societal equality and a privatized perspective on disability in the UK, but more collective ideas on the handling of disability in New Zealand for example. Cerasella Chis gives voice to disabled gig economy workers in a cooperative research effort to question fundamental paradigms of productivity and need orientation toward disabled people in capitalist societies and develop pragmatic tools to oppose everyday oppression and extraction of disabled workers. Tausz et al. employ a multi method approach in two Hungarian settlements to understand how disabled people managed their work in formal and informal sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic, unraveling that population density determines the support patterns toward community or family based solutions. The panel hosts a group of international emerging and established scholars who use a variety of methods to explore the political construct of disability in policy making and in the labor market for collective or individual action.

Sub Unit

• General Paper and Panel Submissions

Individual Presentations

• Dependent Claim-Makers and Representation - Kjersti Skarstad

• Reinforcing and Resisting the Neoliberalization of Disability: Comparing Representative Frames Used in Three Different Parliaments - Ruth Gazsó Candlish, Central European University

• Envisioning a Post-capitalist Society through Gig Economy Subjects of Disablement’s Critiques of Productivity and Disablement - Ioana Cerasella Chis, University of Glasgow

• Social Innovations in the Ecosystem of Formal and Informal Sectors Supporting Persons with Disabilities in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic - Katalin Tausz, Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, Budapest; Nóra Menich, Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Social Sciences; Borbála Bányai, ELTE Eötvös Lorand University; Lucia Csabai, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University

Chair

• Jacob Forrest Harrison Smith Fordham University

Discussant

• Sally Friedman SUNY, Albany