Search

The criminalization of HIV non-disclosure represents a significant issue of concern among people living with HIV, those working across the HIV sector, public health practitioners, and health and human rights advocates around the world. Recently, the government of Canada began a review of the criminal law regarding HIV non-disclosure and invited feedback from the public about potential reforms to the Criminal Code. In light of this public consultation, this commentary examines social science research from Canadian scholars that documents the intersecting damaging effects of HIV criminalization. Canadian social scientists and other researchers have shown that HIV criminalization is applied in uneven and discriminatory ways, impedes HIV prevention efforts, perpetuates HIV stigma, and has a damaging impact on the daily lives of people living with HIV. We argue that there is an urgent need for reforms that will significantly restrict how the criminal law is applied to HIV non-disclosure.

Critical policy studies, as illustrated in this Handbook, challenges the conventional approaches public policy inquiry. But it offers important innovations as well, in particular its focus on discursive politics, policy argumentation and deliberation, and interpretive modes of analysis.

"Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how artistic and radical efforts are reshaping disability activism in Canada and, in the process, challenging dominant perceptions of disability. Recent changes to Canadian disability policy have seen disability programs hampered by funding cuts and other austerity measures. But this oppression has also given new life to an already vibrant Canadian tradition of disability activism. Until now, research has focused on the legal and policy spheres and overlooked disability activism that expresses itself alongside and outside conventional policy reform, often through a variety of art forms. Here, contributions by disability artists, activists, and academics show how disability art is distinctive as both art and social action. Richly illustrated with photographs and other images, and including an insightful concluding chapter by renowned disability scholar Tanya Titchkoksy, this array of artistic, cultural, and radical approaches to disability politics demonstrates that disability activism is as varied as the populations it represents. As the contributors sketch the shifting contours of disability politics in Canada and show how disability oppression is not isolated from other prejudices, they challenge us to re-examine how we enact social and political change." -- Publisher's website.

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.

"Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how artistic and radical efforts are reshaping disability activism in Canada and, in the process, challenging dominant perceptions of disability. Recent changes to Canadian disability policy have seen disability programs hampered by funding cuts and other austerity measures. But this oppression has also given new life to an already vibrant Canadian tradition of disability activism. Until now, research has focused on the legal and policy spheres and overlooked disability activism that expresses itself alongside and outside conventional policy reform, often through a variety of art forms. Here, contributions by disability artists, activists, and academics show how disability art is distinctive as both art and social action. Richly illustrated with photographs and other images, and including an insightful concluding chapter by renowned disability scholar Tanya Titchkoksy, this array of artistic, cultural, and radical approaches to disability politics demonstrates that disability activism is as varied as the populations it represents. As the contributors sketch the shifting contours of disability politics in Canada and show how disability oppression is not isolated from other prejudices, they challenge us to re-examine how we enact social and political change." -- Publisher's website.

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.

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.