Alter-European Journal of Disability Research最新文献

In 2014, the European Court of Justice recognized, for the first time, that severe obesity could be considered as a disability at work. This recognition, not yet applied in France, emerges in a context where obesity as a disease to treat seems to be consensus. The development of obesity surgery and its medical results are reinforcing this perspective. The lack of public debate in France on this potential handicap recognition of obesity, and simultaneously the frequent use of the term disability or “de-disability” by people operated to discuss the effects of this surgery are two findings at the origin of the article. In an ethnographic approach, it is proposed to give an account of the way in which people, experimenting this corporal transformation, participate in redefining obesity, bariatric surgery and disability, before the debates and political decisions that could trigger this recognition of disability. Starting from the emic neologism “de-disability”, the thread of the article, it is questioned the idea of exit from disability and entry into normality, showing that these situations confront the people operated with new social injunctions and examine the relationship between disability and normality in an original way.

This research note presents a thesis research led on the social representations of the amputated body fitted with prostheses, in the light of the contemporary collective imagination. The main aim was to observe, compare and analyse the way in which the public and media consider the field of prostheses, and bring these collective projections and imaginations face to face with how the amputees (but also the caregivers who surround them) see themselves and construct their own social and bodily identity. The goal was to reveal the existence of a certain gap between what the collective discourse producers (media, scientists) think to know about amputees and prostheses, and the reality observed on site (practical problems, customs and practices of everyday life). The final aim was to formulate proposals to overcome these ambiguous conceptions, to question the notions of social inclusion and exclusion of disability and the technological repairs of the body, and to put the amputees at the heart of more rational, pragmatic and ethical considerations, far from any prediction, speculation and phantasmagoria.

Among the disabled workforce, many are engaged in part-time work. However, research regarding the relationship between disability and part-time work has only partially elucidated how people with disabilities who are in receipt of partial or graded disability pensions perceive and handle the combination of part-time work with their pension payments. This article addresses the narrated strategies employed by people with disabilities in managing part-time employment, drawing on interview data from 10 Norwegian citizens who worked part-time in addition to receiving a graded disability pension. The findings illustrate that flexibility and visibility are specific strategies that our informants implement when health issues and reduced working hours result in weakened connections to the workplace. The article demonstrates how the discourses around paid employment facilitate these strategies. By providing insight into people's narrated experiences of engaging in part-time work with disabilities, the article offers significant recommendations into the conditions necessary for people with disabilities to remain employed while also in receipt of graded disability pensions.

The laws adopted in France in favour of war-disabled people following the First World War have significantly changed the social assistance frameworks and the possible situations for disabled people. By allowing war-disabled persons to work if they choose to do so while receiving an inalienable pension, and also by relying on new disability assessment grids as functional damages, these laws have opened up new spaces of freedom and unprecedented criticism for the disabled people. More than a global change in the treatment, social representations or trajectories of these, because innovations remain scattered, fragile and variable, it's the creation of a new framework and a new space of possibilities that is witnessed during the interwar period: the disability in the strict sense of the word. We would like to sketch it out here. The new laws are the main conditions of possibility of this; it extends between the two World Wars from the exceptional status of Veterans to the claim of equality of right to all the disabled; it's expressed in rare but shared and repeated experiences, formulated by the mutilated Veterans and then the civilian invalids.

In total, 60,500 British soldiers were wounded in the head or eyes during the First World War. Despite these numbers facially-wounded ex-servicemen, in particular their post-war experiences, are largely overlooked in the social history of the conflict. Whilst part of a wider constituency of war-wounded veterans, owing to the value ascribed to the face in terms of personal identity and socio-economic values, disfigured veterans were excluded from the discourse of masculine heroism in which other war wounds were framed. Narratives of facial injury emphasised despairing passivity, which acted to emasculate and ‘other’ the facially-wounded. How accurately though does this reflect their lived experiences? Using first-hand testimony from facially-injured ex-servicemen this article challenges the representation of the disfigured veteran as passive, arguing that men exercised agency through their self-representations and behavioural responses. Drawing on normative conceptions of masculinity, and on idealised images of war-wounded veterans, facially-wounded ex-servicemen constructed counter-narratives of their emotional response to facial injury which emphasised conformity to these ideals. The conceptualisation of disfigurements as war wounds, and the high cultural status of the war-disabled, allowed facially-wounded ex-servicemen to reclaim the masculine status which they were denied in popular representations, and to assert their right to social visibility in post-war Britain.