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Social networking sites have gained widespread popularity and remain a popular way of keeping in contact with others. Drawing on networked individualism, this paper argues that Facebook is beneficial for recruiting disabled participants spread over a wide geographical area. The aim of the article is to provide a comparison between using Facebook as a recruitment tool and the more traditional form of face-to-face recruitment via attending events for people with dwarfism. These were the two main forms of recruitment used to understand how people with dwarfism navigate through public spaces. This paper argues that Facebook is not just good for recruiting disabled participants, but also for disabled researchers to use as an accessible form of recruitment. However, building on recruitment experiences, including those influenced by a digital divide, this paper demonstrates that caution must be taken when trying to recruit participants using Facebook alone. This paper offers recommendations for researchers considering using Facebook as a recruitment tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on studies carried out in Canada (2016-2018) and the UK (2009-18) which explored the experiences of boys and men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Life expectancy with DMD has increased significantly and generations of men lead lives that many did not expect them to be leading. This paper searches our data to see if boys and men with DMD are supported to manage the precariousness of a life shorter than the 'norm'. Our studies had focuses on transition to adulthood, gender, social care, interactions in rehabilitation clinics, and managing conversations about death. The paper discusses how respondents framed DMD within time and the life-course. Our analysis suggests that ableist assumptions about time make the management of a challenging disease such as DMD even more challenging. We found little evidence of boys and men being helped to think through how to plan for a life expectancy that kept shifting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dwarfism is commonly defined as anyone 4ft 10″ (147.32 cm) or below and whose short stature involves a medical condition [Adelson, M. B. 2005.The Lives of Dwarfs, xv. NJ: Rutgers University Press]. Whilst it recognized that the built environment is unsuitable for dwarfs [see Kruse, R. 2002. “Social Spaces of Little People: The Experiences of the Jamisons.”Social and Cultural Geography3 (2): 175–191, Kruse, R. 2010. “Placing Little People: Dwarfism and Geographies of Everyday Life.” InTowards Enabling Geographies, edited by V. Chouinard, E. Hall, and R. Wilton, 183–198. Surrey: Ashgate; Shakespeare, T., M. Wright, and S. Thompson. 2007.A Small Matter of Equality: Living with Restricted Growth. Newcastle: Newcastle University], this paper critically examines how spaces and facilities designed with other users in mind, including disabled people and children, can have unintended consequences for dwarfs. The data used in this paper are taken from semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation exercises conducted with 22 dwarfs living in the UK. Overall this paper shows the spatial experiences of dwarfs, which are a result of the unintended consequences of disabled child spaces and facilities, and suggests how Universal Design may be a more appropriate design concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a small-scale qualitative study of the life experiences of adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) in the UK, this paper explores the formal and informal supports used by the adults to achieve and maintain a lifestyle of their choice. Many adults with CF do not have visible impairments and are faced with deciding to disclose CF so they can claim the formal supports of independent living, or presenting as ‘normal’ and forfeiting the formal supports which may accompany disclosure. At an individual level, both strategies can offer a route to a ‘normal life’. However, wider analysis of independent living and formal and informal supports in the lives of adults with CF is overdue; this paper presents an initial such analysis in the context of the UK coalition government's vision for adult social care and the voluntarism of ‘Big Society’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the place of the 'voice' in the history of intellectual disability, drawing principally on developments in the UK, but also making reference to comparative developments in other countries. Various approaches have been used by research historians to collect and represent the voices of those involved in this history; including biographical reconstruction, oral history, institutional histories and life histories. In response to the challenge, 'Nothing About Us Without Us' the slogan of the disabled people's movement, the paper argues for the careful use of oral and biographical accounts to augment histories told through official sources and examines some of the methodological challenges associated with such approaches. However, the argument of this paper, ultimately, is in favour of what we are calling 'inclusive history', where academic historians and oral/life historians contribute to the development of a shared history of intellectual disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a small scale doctoral research project that engaged a critical disability studies (CDS) lens and is rooted in a Grounded Theory methodological approach, this paper explores the experiences of visually impaired and blind students regarding their access and negotiation of inclusion within UK higher education (HE). The emergent research findings, which here focus on the process and practical application of Disabled Student's Allowance, accommodation within student living and, more broadly, social interactions within HE, reveal a liminal and bounded participation contrary to the ongoing processes and practices, within HE, which purport equity and inclusion. By foregrounding the voices of these visually impaired students, whilst expanding upon existing understanding of the experiences of disabled students, the important discussions of day-to-day social interactions and identity as a visually impaired person and student reveal an important juxtaposition between the rhetoric of inclusion and individual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews theory and research on disability and gender from a UK perspective. It reflects upon the theoretical perspectives and debates that are to be found in UK disability studies today, and considers their relevance for research on the gendered nature of disability. Themes in empirical research are noted, as is the representation and treatment of disability in mainstream feminism(s). The paper warns about the danger of exclusion through nominal inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the shifting landscape of civil society alongside the emergence of ‘Big Society’ in the UK. We do so as we begin a research projectBig Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and Civil Society[Economic and Social Research Council (ES/K004883/1)]; we consider what ‘Big Society’ might mean for the lives of disabled people labelled with learning disabilities (LDs). In the paper, we explore the ways in which the disabled body/mind might be thought of as a locus of contradictions as it makes problematic Big Society notions of: active citizenship and social capital. Our aim is to queer(y), or to trouble, these Big Society ideas, and to suggest that disability offers new ways of thinking through civil society. This leads us to three new theoretical takes upon civil society: (1) queer(y)ing active citizenship, (2) queer(y)ing social capital and (3) shaping, resisting and queer(y)ing Big Society. We conclude by suggesting that now is the time for disabled people with LDs to re-enter the fray in a new epoch of crip civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aim: To more fully understand the experiences of seclusion in a learning disability service for women. Background: This paper reports on one of the analytical themes, seclusion, from an ethnographic study exploring the lives of learning disabled women on locked wards. Method: Participant observation was used on three locked wards for women in a learning disability secure (forensic) unit in the United Kingdom. Themes from the analysis of field-notes were used to construct an interview schedule. Sixteen detained women and ten staff participated in interviews. Results: The thematic analysis produced four areas of relevance: the seclusion room environment, reasons for using seclusion, termination of seclusion and alternatives to seclusion. Conclusion: Detained women's descriptions of seclusion portrayed a bewildering, distressing experience which violated their privacy. Alternative practices such as providing a space for anger and resolve, and time for discussion with staff were identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent social security policies in Australia and the UK for workless disabled people. The paper outlines developments in both countries over the past two decades and points to the fact that while there may be differences in the detail, the trends in such policies in the two countries are similar. This involves moves towards stricter eligibility criteria, greater expectation of workless disabled people to make efforts to (re)enter paid employment and, through such processes, a redrawing of the ‘disability category’ that denotes the ‘truly’ disabled from those who are deemed capable of doing at least some paid work. The paper goes on to consider explanations of such change, arguing that liberal explanations in the social administration tradition are problematic and that they, therefore, need to be placed within the neoliberal project, in particular its concern with putting people to work. The paper concludes that this has essentially involved a redrawing of the disability category to ensure a smaller number of people of working age in both countries can legitimately claim an existence outside of paid work. The paper also argues that more comparative research is required to understand the impacts of such trends on disabled people and provide insights for those resisting the influence of neoliberalism on welfare regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008 the Employment and Support Allowance was introduced in the UK as the income replacement benefit for disabled people. In this paper we focus upon the reasons for its introduction, the notions of disability and the two main ideas – capability and personalization – that provide the framework for its operation. The paper engages with the arguments put forward by the UK's government that the Employment and Support Allowance will enable disabled people to access paid work in greater numbers. The paper argues that Employment and Support Allowance will become part of a disabling employment architecture because it does little to improve the human capital of disabled people and is concerned with getting them into entry-level employment that is part of the ‘low pay, no pay’ cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New Deal for Disabled People (NDDP) is a voluntary programme designed to help people with disabilities and health conditions secure (sustainable) employment. It was delivered through a national network of public, private and voluntary sector organizations (known as Job Brokers). This paper discusses the impact of NDDP and how its relative success was enabled by the wider institutional environment. NDDP was cost-beneficial in both reducing incapacity-related benefit receipt and increasing the employment rate of programme participants. The institutional factors covered are: programme take-up, contract management and funding regime, and Job Brokers relationships with the public employment service, Jobcentre Plus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A 24-member ensemble of 1-h high-resolution forecasts over the Southern United Kingdom is used to study short-range forecast error statistics. The initial conditions are found from perturbations from an ensemble transform Kalman filter. Forecasts from this system are assumed to lie within the bounds of forecast error of an operational forecast system. Although noisy, this system is capable of producing physically reasonable statistics which are analysed and compared to statistics implied from a variational assimilation system. The variances for temperature errors for instance show structures that reflect convective activity. Some variables, notably potential temperature and specific humidity perturbations, have autocorrelation functions that deviate from 3-D isotropy at the convective-scale (horizontal scales less than 10 km). Other variables, notably the velocity potential for horizontal divergence perturbations, maintain 3-D isotropy at all scales. Geostrophic and hydrostatic balances are studied by examining correlations between terms in the divergence and vertical momentum equations respectively. Both balances are found to decay as the horizontal scale decreases. It is estimated that geostrophic balance becomes less important at scales smaller than , and hydrostatic balance becomes less important at scales smaller than , although more work is required to validate these findings. The implications of these results for high-resolution data assimilation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A narrow line of convective showers was observed over southern England on 18 July 2005 during the Convective Storm Initiation Project (CSIP). The showers formed behind a cold front (CF), beneath two apparently descending dry layers (i.e. sloping so that they descended relative to the instruments observing them). The lowermost dry layer was associated with a tropopause fold from a depression, which formed 2 d earlier from a breaking Rossby wave, located northwest of the UK. The uppermost dry layer had fragmented from the original streamer due to rotation around the depression (This rotation was also responsible for the observations of apparent descent—ascent would otherwise be seen behind a CF). The lowermost dry layer descended over the UK and overran higher air beneath it, resulting in potential instability. Combined with a surface convergence line (which triggered the convection but had less impact on the convective available potential energy than the potential instability), convection was forced up to 5.5 km where the uppermost dry layer capped it. The period when convection was possible was very short, thus explaining the narrowness of the shower band. Convective Storm Initiation Project observations and model data are presented to illustrate the unique processes in this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a signifier of worth and recognition, employment is presented as a route to reduce inequality. Yet, for people who have an intellectual disability (ID) and are in receipt of social care, employment policy is often a site of tension. With less than six percent of working-aged people within this demographic in any form of employment in the UK (Learning Disabilities Observatory 2016), work is offered through a marginalised context, with individuals who wish to explore work often excluded from the very programmes set up to support them. Based on ethnographic research at a job club supporting people with an ID and using a case study narrative approach, I unpack the multifaceted reality of everyday life for learning disabled people struggling to access work, its intersections with national minimum wage legislation, and how space can be crafted in response to such exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalisation has dominated social care across OECD countries over the past 20 years. UK policy evolved from the efforts of disabled peoples' organisations (DPOs) to secure the availability of cash payments as part of a wider drive to enable independent living. Implementation of personalisation across the UK has seen significant divergence in how governments have developed their own responses, but in each country the DPOs' role and impact has shifted from campaigning and promoting the voices of disabled people to a more muted focus on service provision and limited policy engagement. This article draws on a series of interviews with DPOs and leading disabled activists. It highlights concerns raised related to themes around austerity, changing relationships with local government and the role of co-production in developing policy. We conclude the article by discussing the future directions for personalisation and developments in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As COVID-19 crosses the globe, disabled people are subject to new medical and discursive realities. Focusing on the consequences of the latter, we utilize news reports from Canada and the UK to argue the current language of pre-existing conditions represents disability as non-life, explaining away the material realities facing disabled persons. This language ignores the distribution of care work in our societies, poverty, and other forms of exclusion facing disabled people and the population more generally. Work on ventilator users points to these existing inequalities, obscured as they may be. This story is not new. Outlining existing narratives within disability studies challenging disability as deadly biological and economic deficiency and situating the 'pre-existing' terminology therein, we look to work in disability studies and bioethics to challenge the disability-death equation. We end reviewing counter-narratives by and for disabled people, highlighting the ongoing and life-affirming resistance throughout the disability rights movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-materialist theories of education highlight the importance of material practices alongside social practices within learning experience. Little is known about inclusive pedagogy for autistic pupils, but this theoretical approach is of relevance since autistic people describe meaningful connections to material things. The aim of this study was to explore the nature of inclusive pedagogy for autistic pupils through the development of two case studies. Research questions focused on tracing the socio-material realities of learning, with information gathered in the form of video recordings. Three realities of learning are described: thinking about maths, asking sensitive questions about the social world, and doing 'hard work' and making mistakes. The analysis shows that materialisation per se does not benefit autistic pupils, but can be used to support learning in certain circumstances, particularly where inherent social meanings are more easily made visible. The analysis shows that supportive relationships are also important sources of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The employment position of people with enduring mental health issues and learning difficulties (intellectual impairment) is a major policy and moral challenge. The continued exclusion from paid work for those disabled people who are otherwise keen to work is marked in Western Europe even in high per capita welfare states. The paradox here is that disabled people have received policy and programme attention, but arguably programmes have become increasingly ‘corporeal’ and medicalized. Condition management programmes (CMPs) epitomize this approach and focus on getting the sick and disabled body/brain more work-ready ahead of wider supports. By way of contrast this article presents the results of a large-scale evaluation of a non-medicalized approach in the UK which concentrated on careful job matching, intensive support and barrier reduction. It argues that flexible personalized approaches will afford greater employment success than a focus on deficits and welfare dependency reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disabled body has come to occupy more than an ‘absent presence’ in critical disability studies. Disability theory has addressed an original somatophobia through debates between social modellists, realists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts and postconventionalists. We briefly trace these debates and then the present article considers two readings of non-normative impaired bodies. Through a focus on the embodiment stories of disabled children we consider those times when their bodies demonstrate some forms of ‘leakage, excess, lack or displacement’. Our first reading, ‘disability’, adopts a social psychoanalytic lens to alert us to the cultural constitution of the disabled body as lack. Our second reading, ‘possability’, adopts a postconventionalist stance and considers the disabled body as productively demanding imaginative theoretical and practical responses. We aim to explore the ways in which the impaired body can be embraced as a unique embodied entity through which to revise how bodies should and could be lived in. Our hope is that understanding these dual parallel processes allows us to keep together disability and possability as key elements of the difference of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article maps a journey of political and policy change in the response towards disabled students studying in British higher education: changes which were underpinned by dominant perceptions about disability. Findings are drawn from an analysis of archival material linked to UK legislative and policy development, together with key informant data, which included the views of senior policy staff and disabled people. Recent changes in the response towards disabled students incorporate findings from an in-depth study at a case study university, which involved extensive interviewing of staff members and disabled students. It is argued that disability was perceived as a welfare issue within higher education policy and provision and, consequently, disabled students were treated differently to other groups who were viewed as experiencing inequality, for example, women and people from ethnic minorities. The failure to understand disability in terms of equality and rights, and as a form of oppression, meant that the inequality and the lack of inclusion experienced by disabled students remained unchallenged until more recent legislative developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is twofold. First, we explore the differences in employment of disabled people between Norway and the United Kingdom, and to what degree differences in employment rates are due to variation in definition and measures of disability. Secondly, we discuss the significance of the two countries belonging to different welfare regimes when it comes to disabled people's relation to the labour market. Most of the data on disabled people's labour market participation stems from the Labour Force Surveys in the two countries, and the 2005 figures are used as a basis. The results indicate that the employment rate of disabled people is higher in the UK than in Norway. The article argues that this is first and foremost due to different ways of defining and measuring disability. The article illustrates why comparing two welfare states can be difficult. Are different welfare regimes of any significance for disabled people's engagement with the labour market? The results indicate that the use of different welfare means within the two regimes may lead to similar results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain has experienced an unprecedented increase in wheelchair use during the past two decades. The authors take a social model approach to disability and report on their study in the north-west of England into the social implications of this increase. Qualitative interviews and a large-scale social survey reveal the circumstances of users and their experiences. Building on their descriptive statistics, the authors use latent class analysis to identify from amongst their respondents the characteristics of dissatisfied users of UK National Health Service wheelchair provision: they were more likely to be older, frailer females; and to be living in residential and nursing care homes. Prescribing practices and policy guidelines are analysed to consider how a hierarchy of need is operating to determine wheelchair allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]