Purpose This commentary reflects upon the article entitled “Diversity and inclusion policies in publicly traded New Zealand companies: Inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities”. Design/methodology/approach This narrative commentary critically reflects upon the Global Reporting Initiative (hereafter, GRI) itself and what the numbers reported in Guruge’s (2023; this issue) article say, paying attention to what we might think and do about such standards and scenarios. Findings This commentary does not present a definitive assessment of the GRI. This is because it is marked by undecidability. Nevertheless, it reads some of the figures, or “data”, which register organisational uptake of GRI standards (or the lack thereof), together with other “data”, to contrive a more stable account. Originality/value This commentary strives to avoid presenting a reductive reading of “data” and, instead, highlights the complex multifaceted dimensions of societies, sustainability, social inclusion, disability and possibilities for inclusive practices.

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The article deconstructs UK Channel 4’s 2012 and 2016 Paralympic advertisements, illustrating how the structure and arrangement of signs combine to challenge and reinforce stereotypical attitudes about ability/disability. However, the focus extends beyond taken-for-granted and commonsensical boundaries of a “text” to contemplate how readers’ readings (e.g. on weblogs, in newspapers, journals, books, etc.) in specific contingent contexts combine to produce paratext that authors meanings relating to ability and disability. Both the advertisements and the readings they engender produce ambiguous and complex meanings that seem to resist, or thwart, authorial intentions to produce positive representations and efforts to master, or govern, texts through binary oppositions. Such fragility and undecidability in the representations, readings, and the texts they combine to produce give them double-edged qualities. Although this makes them comparable to the pharmakon, namely a beneficial remedy and/or drug/poison, with regard to their likely impact upon a media landscape containing other portrayals of disability, the undecidability of the texts coincides with the dis/ability and dis/abled identities to which they refer.

The article engages with arrangements of time and space and how they conjoin to constitute a disability chronotope that combines with other textual elements to both expand and limit empathetic horizons in Still Human, a film about a physically impaired middle-aged man and his Pilipino foreign domestic helper (FDH), set largely within a Hong Kong public housing estate. The study distinguishes between the text’s declarative and descriptive layers, albeit while recognizing the forced and perhaps violent nature of this division. Structuring the surface of the film are technical codes and a chronological, optimistic, and sometimes humorous overcoming narrative through which protagonists triumph over tragedy. However, the surface of the text is intermittently disturbed by descriptive layers, or figurative currents. Although this troubling content appears peripheral to, and on the margins of, the text, this underlying and seemingly extraneous content is a crucial supplement which may more effectively realize authorial intentions to disclose the protagonists’ humanness and engender empathy than the more prominent technical codes that structure the text’s surface. Such coexisting layers illustrate how texts are stratified and how the content of texts and the intentions of authors are haunted by undecidability.

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