Search

Canadian charities have a history of advocating for social and policy change. With the 1985 Income Tax Act, charities became restricted to using up to 10% of their resources toward nonpartisan political activities. They subsequently underwent an audit initiated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012. The legal climate changed again when the 10% rule was dropped in 2018, enabling charities to pursue political activities with no predefined limit. In this article, we examine grey literature on the political advocacy 'situation' of charities between 1983 and 2021, guided by Adele Clarke's situational analysis methodology (2005). Our findings and discussion center around the prevalent discursive positions taken and not taken in the situation and the assumptions and rationalities that inform them. We explore what turns out to be a non-linear situation influenced by an assemblage of rationalities and practices that primarily foster distrust in the charitable sector and call for enhanced discipline-oriented regulation. Particular attention is paid to the neoliberal logics that underlie these positions. Alternative conceptualizations of charitable sector advocacy are also offered through appeals to democratic participation and freedom of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how older motherhood and older mothers are problematised and represented in key Canadian policy texts on 'delayed childbearing' and 'advanced maternal age'. Drawing on critical disability studies and feminist scholarship on motherhood, we identify three kinds of representations of older mothers in these texts: as risk-producing subjects, as unnatural mothers, and as irresponsible reproductive citizens. We argue that dominant discourses of older motherhood are structured by both ageism and ableism, which undergird policy documents. These discourses frame older women as disabled by the 'burden' of late parenthood and cast them as risky subjects who might give birth to 'abnormal' offspring. Within this discursive terrain, older women are not only othered: they are held responsible for their infertility and for their reduced propensity to reproduce 'healthy,' non-disabled offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is HIV/AIDS both exceptional yet no longer worthy of a distinct state response? Reflecting on state efforts in Canada to normalize HIV/AIDS and fold it into a more integrated response to sexually transmitted infections and bloodborne illnesses, we examine how 'end of HIV/AIDS exceptionalism' narratives obscure the new ways in which state power is being deployed such that, at the level of bodies and community organizations, actors are still subjected to exceptional state surveillance and control. In spite of continued efforts to normalize HIV/AIDS and blunt the advocacy of AIDS organizations, we argue that state power has intensified in ways that suggest that HIV/AIDS is still exceptional after all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil's governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro's dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best be described as governance without (central) government. We begin with an overview of public health governance in the country before introducing the main theoretical concepts that guide our analysis, namely the notions of 'government by exception' and 'strategic ignorance'. Finally, we sketch the main features of this emerging form of (non)governance of COVID-19. We highlight the new forms of solidarity and mutual aid that have emerged in favelas and Indigenous communities, which have stepped in to fill the void left by a limited federal presence. The article concludes by reflecting on what this collapse of public health reveals about the limitations of democratic governance in the age of Bolsonaro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The criminalization of HIV nondisclosure is reshaping the landscape of support and care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Focusing on Canada, this article examines how criminalization is reshaping the relationships between frontline AIDS Service Organization (ASO) workers and their HIV-positive service users. Using data gleaned through semi-structured interviews with N = 62 frontline ASO staff members across Canada that were coded using thematic analysis, we describe how ASO workers are rethinking and altering their notetaking practices in light of fears about criminalization and how their charts may be used by legal actors. Specifically, we identified three main themes. First, awareness that their notes can be subpoenaed and used against their clients in criminal proceedings is leading ASO staff to keep less detailed records of their conversations with PLWHA, although there were variations by the type of position held. Participants with professional obligations (doctors, nurses, social workers) reported that they continue to keep more detailed charting records than other frontline ASO staff (peer counselors, educators, etc.). Second, participants acknowledged that criminalization threatens the trust dynamic in the therapeutic relationship and that by taking less detailed notes they risk the quality of care provided. Third, we found that evolving knowledge about risk and responsibility in light of criminalization is impacting the type of counsel ASO workers offer to PLWHA regarding how to document disclosure. The article concludes by reflecting on the challenges associated with navigating the "medico-legal borderland", as ASO staff balance their commitments to serving PLWHA with the realities created by the harsh climate of criminalization. Greater political attention should be paid to the risks that criminalization poses to frontline HIV support work and efforts to support PLWHA, who already face significant stigma, without the additional stigma of the criminal label. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the advocacy of mothers and intended mothers in the fields of autism and infertility. Mothers and intended mothers have developed a special competence in dealing with professionals, and in negotiating the delicate balance between expert medical discourses and expertise grounded in their situated knowledge and experiences. Drawing on the social movement and public policy literature, we seek to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about the gendered role of women and mothers in these complex and emotionally charged policy fields. We argue that (intended) mothers are far more likely than other women to take on the major advocacy role considering their need to respond to bodily, social, and/or cultural 'failures' imposed on them by the medical establishment. Issues of access to fertility treatments and care for autistic children not only provide a vantage point from which to study their experience in the policy arena, but also to ask broader questions about the role of the welfare state and the shifting authority of experts in policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements. We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities approach. Our aim is not to offer a cross-cultural account of autism or to assume a coherence or universality of ‘autism’ as a singular diagnostic category/reality. Rather, we map the ways in which what is experienced and understood as autism, plays out in different cultural contexts, drawing on the notion of ‘epistemic communities’ to explore shifts in knowledge about autism, including concepts such as ‘neurodiversity’, and how these travel through cultural spaces. The paper explores two key epistemic tensions; the dominance of ‘neuro culture’ and dominant constructions of personhood and what it means to be human. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the role of social movements in the policy process and, in particular, the ways in which movements interact with, access, and deploy expert knowledge. In the technocratic model, citizens are conceptualized as undifferentiated, rather than considered in terms of distinctive identities or interests. Their inclusion in policy-making is viewed as a technical problem to be 'solved' through forms of citizen engagement, rather than viewing citizens as active agents in the mobilization of distinctive knowledges. Citizens, we argue, are more than the undifferentiated lump that appears in the technocratic model under the guise of citizen engagement. Drawing on a case study of autism activism in Canada and the US, we demonstrate the range of ways in which civil society actors both deploy and contest expert knowledge in the policy process, and discuss the implications for how we conceptualize knowledge mobilization in policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]