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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. (Contains 2 tables and 3 notes.)

This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the telework literature by investigating empirically the impact of social influence on the decision to telework. An innovative web-based telework survey was developed and used to obtain data from a sample of employees of a large postsecondary institution in Ontario, Canada, between January and March 2009. A unique feature of the survey instrument is that it allowed employees to easily construct their workplace social networks. Using a univariate (binary) probit model, we identify three mutually exclusive sources of social influence on the decision to telework: friends who telework, neighbors who telework, and colleagues at the workplace. With respect to colleagues, we find that the net impact of social influence is governed by both the composition and the size of an employee's workplace social network. Composition is captured by interacting telework status with relationship strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the implications of recent Welfare State restructuring for psychiatric survivors' citizenship status. Using the Province of Ontario as a case study, the paper examines the extent to which recent change in mental health care and social assistance programs has worked to facilitate or constrain survivors' ability to exercise control over their lives. Despite recognition of the importance of survivors' participation in the mental health care system in the late 1980s, recent years have seen a return to a more traditional treatment paradigm characterized by professional control. Concurrently, restructuring of social assistance programs has led to a decline in the real value of income supports and growing pressure on informal support networks. As a result, psychiatric survivors are increasingly held responsible for their own material well-being and public conduct, but are less able to exercise control within everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use psychoanalytic theory to look at the meaning of disability within an ableist culture, and its relationship to issues of sexuality and death. I suggest that while disability has not been a central focus of psychoanalysis, it has been employed to stand in for something else, and this has had important implications for disability that have yet to be fully explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of disability as a 'symbolic substitute' for castration as conceived by Freud and Lacan, and the implications of this formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking. While there is cause for continued caution with respect to this theoretical tradition, psychoanalysis offers important insight into the complex origins of 'aesthetic anxieties' that surround disability within ableist culture, and the way in which these emotions are implicated in the geographic exclusion of 'different' bodies. In particular, psychoanalysis helps to demonstrate the illusory nature of the 'able-body' as a key source of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the importance of 'race' and racialization in conflicts over the siting of human service facilities. Little consideration has been given to the way in which racialization shapes community reactions to client groups, and the idea that NIMBY reactions facilitate the reproduction of white privilege. I explore these issues using a case study of community opposition to 'special needs' housing in San Pedro, California. Analysis demonstrates that some facility opponents racialized client groups in an attempt to defend the socio-spatial privileges of whiteness. Opponents also used a romanticized and 'whitened' construction of community to mark 'special needs' clients out of place. However, other community members used European ethnic identities to mark the whiteness of middle-class opponents. The case study provides insight into the racialization of need, and the way in which whiteness is struggled over within specific social contexts. It also contributes to an understanding of how claims to European ethnicity may be used to veil and/or challenge white privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on projects illustrating the application of qualitative health research in providing medical care to AIDS patients and HIV-positive persons. Questions to consider before applying the methodology; Complexity of the series of lifestyle negotiations among AIDS patients and HIV-positive people uncovered by qualitative health research.