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.
This article provides an analysis of the key areas of struggle for the Australian disability movement during the Howard years of government. After providing a brief overview of the Australian disability movement and its historical development, we then move to situate the struggles of the Australian disability movement within the broader context of welfare to work, one of the central tenets of neoliberal social policy restructuring. From here, three sites of struggle emerge that have been central to the Australian disability movement's struggles for representation, recognition and redistribution and principally include state restructuring of disability open labour market supports, state legitimation of disability sheltered workshops and, finally, the pensionercategorization of disability within social security law and policy.
<p>In this paper we aim to explore the realm of impairment in terms of its politicization under transnational claims for justice. The realm of disability rights and justice has been a central theme in disability analytical inquiry and by disability movement actors engaged in struggles of disability affirmative politics. Within this frame, there has been an increasing amount of disability scholarship and activism at the transnational sphere. In fact, since the ratification of the UNCRPD (2006) greater transnational alliances have become a central feature to advancing disability affirmative claims for rights and justice. While welcomed, we argue that within the transnational realm, the focus on disability alone critically marginalizes those groups engaging in repertories of action within the <em>logos </em>of impairment as transnational claims for disability justice tend to naturalise impairment and negate the production of impairment under global structural processes of violence. To address this issue, we suggest that the growing scholarship on transnational theorizing and activism within disability needs to respond to these claims for justice and rights. To conclude we argue that transnational theorizing and praxis is in fact, a <em>double move</em> – an affirmative politics of disability rights and justice and a transformative politics of impairment.</p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>Keywords: </strong>impairment, justice, rights, disability politics, majority world, justice, North–South power relations, Southern epistemologies</p>
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