Precarious Lives in the Global South: On Being Disabled in Guyana

Most of what is known about disabled women's and men's lives is based on research conducted in the global North despite the fact that 80% of the world's one billion disabled people live in countries of the global South. This article addresses this gap in our understanding of disabled people's lives by examining impairment and disability as outcomes of processes of social embodiment that unfold in an unequal global capitalist order. Drawing on 87 interviews conducted with disabled women and men in Guyana, the article illustrates how colonial and neo‐colonial relations of power and processes of development give rise to material conditions of life such as extreme poverty and male violence that contribute to impairment and disability. The article concludes by discussing the article's contributions, challenges in developing southern perspectives on impairment and disability, and the need to address socio‐spatial injustices experienced by disabled people in the global South.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

Gendered death risks among disabled individuals in Sweden

This study follows around 500 disabled individuals over their lifespan to examine their risks of dying in 19th-century society, in comparison to a reference group of non-disabled people. The aim is to detect whether people, due to their disability, had a higher probability of meeting an untimely death. We use Sweden’s 19th-century parish registers to identify people the ministers defined as disabled, and to construct a reference group of individuals who were not affected by these disabilities. By combining the deviance theories from sociology studies with demographic sources and statistical methods, we achieve new insight into how life developed for disabled people in past societies. The results suggest that disability significantly jeopardized the survival of individuals, particularly men, but also that the type of disability had an impact. Altogether, we can demonstrate that the disabled constituted a disadvantaged but heterogeneous group of people whose demography and life courses must be further researched.     

Designers' Attitudes Towards Disabled People and the Compliance of Public Open Places: The Case of Istanbul

Although accessibility has become one of the major concerns in both urban design and architecture, many urban facilities are still non-compliant with accessibility standards. This paper aims to assess designers' attitudes towards disabled people in Istanbul and to test their responses by determining the compliance with access standards for Istanbul's public open places. The study used the United Nations implementation checklist on accessibility, which covers 19 items of 4 main groups. Data were collected at four crowded public squares of old and new centres of Istanbul chosen randomly. The highest compliance was found in Kadiköy square (39%), whereas the lowest was found in Be?iktas (26.3%). To assess designers' knowledge of disabled people's needs, a questionnaire was presented to 114 architects and contractors. Data showed that the majority of them did not learn about disabled people's needs in the physical environment during their professional education and that in their projects today, they provide accessible environments only for wheelchair users. In short, due to gaps in the system that educates professional designers and the absence of enforcement, the examined open public squares in Istanbul have accomplished very little in terms of accessibility for disabled people.     

‘La doble condición’: landmine victims,forced displacement,and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio

The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability.     

Urban spatial politics and collective action in revolutionary Cairo: Counter spaces and paradoxes of mobilisation

This article centres the role of Cairo's popular forces in the 2011 revolutionary Uprising in Egypt. It does so by bringing to focus the relationship between these forces' everyday spatial practices and forms of contention, on one hand, and revolutionary activism and protests in central places like Tahrir Square, on the other. It demonstrates that everyday life in popular neighbourhoods of Cairo is constitutive of a political domain in which ordinary citizens cultivate resources, dispositions and capacities for collective action and mobilisation of the kind witnessed in the January Uprising. It also shows how the lived experiences of ordinary citizens in the city's popular neighbourhoods are formative of the oppositional subjectivities enacted in the context of this revolutionary mobilisation.The article identifies and illuminates two primary paradoxes of revolutionary mobilisation. The two paradoxes arise out of a disjuncture between modalities of action pursued by Tahrir-oriented revolutionary activists (al-thuwwar) on one hand, and popular forces' tactics, strategies and conception of the Revolution, on the other. Tracing the engagement of popular forces in the context of the Uprising, this contribution reveals that in enacting their oppositional subjectivities popular forces articulated their own conception of the Revolution. More specifically, the article expounds on how they did so by shifting the locale of revolutionary action from Tahrir Square to Cairo's streets and popular neighbourhoods, and by widening acts of urban insurgency to advance rights claims to the city.     

After Gentrification: Social Mix,Settler Colonialism,and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space

Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR's socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.     

Disability and Active Life Expectancy Among Older Cambodians

Older adults in Cambodia are survivors of harsh living conditions, including poverty and periods of extreme violence. Although these experiences may affect health outcomes, little data has existed to monitor Cambodia's older population. The current paper uses data from the 2004 Study of the Elderly in Cambodia (SEC) and focuses on disability status. The data is the first of its kind for Cambodia—a comprehensive survey employing a representative sample of adults 60 and older living across the country. Disability prevalence by age and sex, Active Life Expectancy (ALE) and common correlates of disability, using Activity of Daily Living (ADL) items, are examined. In addition, disability prevalence rates are compared to those for older adults living in other countries in South-east Asia. The results indicate that older Cambodians are more disabled than their counterparts living elsewhere. Possible reasons include long-term influence of social disruption and poverty. Women live longer than men, but spend a greater proportion of their remaining life in states of disability and severe disability. Correlates of disability show that younger age, being male, having higher income satisfaction, being married and living in urban areas associate with lower probabilities of reporting disability. A contribution of the analysis is the examination of a basic measure of health among a population of which little is known.     

Audit Bodies: Embodied Participation,Disability Universalism,and Accessibility in India

Abstract: In this article we think critically about the role of the “access audit” in creating new forms of embodied participation, experiential and technical expertise, and imaginaries of what the modern Indian city should be. We analyze how disability activists make claims about the relationship between subjective bodily experiences and bodies of objective knowledge. We also explore the emergence of a professional access audit apparatus focused on technical standards. As neither volunteer nor professional access audits result in significant architectural or structural changes, we are interested in what other effects and affects these audits produce and what discursive authority claims of inaccessibility have. This article analyzes the practice of conducting “access audits” by lay and professional disability rights activists and organizations in urban India. We argue that access audits are overly focused and that they have limited impact. In overly focusing on physical and technical access, auditors miss the importance of programmatic and policy interventions as well as the need for a more collective contentious politics. Our research illustrates that the contested field of access auditing appears to prevent a unified disability coalition from forming. In addition, it is important for auditors to think critically about the concept of “access” and ask what social, economic, and political processes are embedded within the concept.     

Archaeology as a Tool to Illuminate and Support Community Struggles in the Black Metropolis of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

The South Side of Chicago — the 'Black Metropolis' — has been the site of many struggles over the years: for human dignity and civil rights; against restrictive real estate covenants; and to control present-day gentrification, to name a few. This legacy is inscribed on the landscape above and below ground. Black Chicagoans are keen to preserve the material manifestations of prior struggles and use preservation to benefit the current inhabitants of 'Bronzeville'. These activists have welcomed the author into collaborative projects that use archaeology and historic preservation to further their goals. Excavation at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Bronzeville Cultural Garden has contributed to our efforts to identify and present stories of the Great Migration and its consequences. At stake are our understandings of how racial and other identities shaped life in this community in the past as well as the neighbourhood's role in the city's future.     

城市中产阶层化研究进展回顾及未来展望

本文在回顾中西方中产阶层化的基础上,总结归纳中产阶层化的基本特征,强调中产阶层化具有周期性及时空性,从古典经济学角度、城市文化以及全球化角度对中产阶层化的理论流派进行研究,分析得出中产阶层化的主要研究内容包括:对中产阶层化的界定、中产阶层化的形成机理、过程、影响以及政府作用的研究,对中国中产阶层化研究未来进行展望,率先明确中国存在中产阶层化时空共轭性;中产阶层第一波普遍性等假设,并指出第二波的中国中产阶层化只有可能发生在某些特大城市中;在中国中产阶层化过程中,要正确处理好原住居民的动迁问题及后续的空间隔离问题。     

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.     

Booming solidarity: Sandinista Nicaragua and the West German Solidarity movement in the 1980s

This article explores the reasons for the strength and persistence of West German solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua during the 1980s. The image of Nicaragua played a key role for activists, as it motivated commitment and identification with the revolution. Their positive perceptions were shaped by the revolutionary reforms in Nicaragua and an effective image campaign by the Sandinista government as well as by activists' political desires and their discontent with West German politics. By promoting their reform policies through a transnational communications infrastructure, by practising cultural and public diplomacy as well as by playing host to thousands of visitors, the Sandinistas encouraged supporters to identify with the revolutionary process and feel part of it at a time when many activists felt like an isolated leftist minority in the Federal Republic.     

Women with disabilities: from discrimination and violence towards an ethics of reciprocity

Since 2001 DPI Italia, the Italian section of Disabled People's International, has played an important role in a series of research projects in the European Commission's Daphne Programme on violence against women with disabilities. Several different types of violence have been identified, from sexual abuse to removal of women's control over their environment to invasion of their privacy in healthcare contexts to control of their reproductive capacity, particularly of women with intellectual disabilities. In the light of these projects, and of the CRPD's recognition of the multiple discriminations experienced by many women with disabilities, the article argues for a shift away from an ethics of care and dependency towards one of equal reciprocal relations between disabled women and others and to a bioethics grounded not in exceptional need but in everyday life. Peer counselling among disabled women is particularly important in effecting this shift.     

An Army of Educators: Gender,Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

The conventional scholarly narrative of gender in post‐revolutionary Cuba is that the revolutionary government prevented the emergence of an expressly feminist movement by addressing women's basic needs and simultaneously eliminating autonomous space for female organising. Recent scholarship has increasingly considered women's participation in revolutions in order to understand women's roles in post‐revolutionary societies. Looking beyond armed insurrection for instances of female participation in revolution, this article considers women's roles in the Cuban Literacy Campaign. An analysis of the testimonies of female former volunteer teachers and of the official rhetoric and content of the campaign suggests that the broader narrative of cooption, while certainly accurate overall, threatens to obscure instances in which women did challenge traditional gender norms in meaningful ways. This paper argues that the Cuban Literacy Campaign and the participation of women in that campaign significantly impacted Cuban patriarchal culture at a crucial moment of consolidation for the revolutionary regime. In other words, though the male‐led revolution did not give women the space to organise against patriarchy, by actively participating in the revolution, women did help change the nature of Cuban patriarchy.     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

Contesting Identity: Politics of gays and lesbians in Toronto in the 1970s: Identidad en Conflicto: políticas de gays y lesbianas en Toronto en los años 1970

This article explores a particular moment in the history of Toronto's gay movement politics when the movements' ideological perspectives on the nature of gay and lesbian identities and associated spaces shifted dramatically from the so-called liberationist stance of the mid-1970s to the so-called ethnic minority approach of the late 1970s. This occurred within the context of a particular series of events that prompted gay activists to rework their conceptualization of gay and lesbian identity in order to be recognized as legitimate participants in certain pivotal, public proceedings. Far from being a well-thought-out and deliberate shift in political strategy, the ‘minority’ argument was, in many ways, a reflexive and unexamined response to unanticipated circumstances. Toronto's gay activists, in representing gays and lesbians as a minority fundamentally altered meanings associated with both gay and lesbian identities and with the spaces dominated or controlled by gay and lesbian interests.

Este artículo explora un momento particular en la historia de las políticas del movimiento de los gays de Toronto cuando sus perspectivas ideológicas sobre la naturaleza de identidades gay y lesbiana y sus espacios respectivos cambiaron dramáticamente, desde la llamada ‘perceptiva liberacionista’ de los mediados de los años setenta hasta la llamada ‘perspectiva de las minorías étnica’ de los últimos años de los setentas. Esta cambio ocurrió dentro del contexto de una serie particular de eventos que incitaron a los activistas gay a revisar sus conceptualizaciónes sobre su identidad gay y lesbiana con el fin de ser reconocidos como participantes legítimos en ciertos procesos públicos. Lejos de ser un cambio bien planeado y deliberado en la estrategia política, el argumento de la ‘minoría’ consistía, de varios maneras, en una repuesta no reflexiva no examinada a circunstancias inesperadas. Los activistas gay de Toronto, al representar a los gays y lesbianas como minorías, alteraron de manera fundamental los significados asociados tanto a las identidades de gays y lesbianas como los espacios dominados o controlados por intereses de gays y lesbianas.     

‘They never pass me the ball’: exposing ableism through the leisure experiences of disabled children,young people and their families

In this paper, we explore the participation of disabled children, young people and their families in leisure activities. Drawing on the accounts of disabled children, young people, and their parents and careers, we reflect on the leisure spaces that they access and record some of their experiences within them. Using the concept of ‘ableism’ [Campbell, F. K. 2009. Contours of Ableism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan] we interrogate the data gathered as part of a two-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Does Every Child Matter, post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods' (RES-062-23-1138). By doing so we identify some of the inherent and embedded discriminations in favour of those children and young people who are perceived to be ‘able’ that simultaneously work to exclude the young ‘kinds of people’ [Hacking, I. 2007. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285–318] categorised as ‘disabled’ and their families from leisure facilities and opportunities. We suggest that currently, disabled families and children occupy a mix of ‘mainstream’, ‘segregated’ and ‘separate’ leisure spaces. We discuss the impact of occupying these spaces and ask what the experiences of accessing leisure by disabled children, young people and their families reveal about the processes and practices of ableism.     

Associations of people with disabilities in Italy: a short history

Voluntary associations of persons with disabilities have played an important role in bringing issues related to disability onto the national agenda in Italy in the absence of effective provision by the state or representation by other bodies, such as the political parties and trades unions. At the same time, the nature of Italy's welfare state – weak, clientelistic, particularistic – and its way of conceiving disability as a set of bodily deficits has also shaped the character of disabled persons' organisations in Italy and the ways in which they have framed their demands and policies. These organisations have tended either to represent fragmented subsets of people with disabilities or, more recently, to form large federations that, while they reflect a more comprehensive understanding of disability, have left some categories of people with disabilities feeling excluded or under-represented     

Beyond ethnonationalism: Transnational mobilisation and framing in Kashmir's freedom movement

Since Indian Administered Kashmir's (IAK) ‘summer of unrest’ of 2010, greater attention towards the contemporary Kashmir azadi, or freedom, movement has led to more active transnational organising by Kashmiris studying abroad as well as other young people who sympathise with this movement. Indian political elites have predominately framed the azadi movement as a separatist movement. However, this perception had not been shared by many Kashmiris who argue the territory has never legally been a part of India. The perception of being a separatist movement from outside of Kashmir has also shifted with a growing body of literature documenting human rights abuses alongside raising awareness to an international community of activists, which has led to an evolution of the azadi movement into a movement for social justice and human rights. This has been facilitated by social media spaces and heterogeneous activist groups framing their movement as aligned with other social justice movements and anti-discrimination campaigns. Framing the Kashmir self-determination movement as a human rights issue appeals to a wider spectrum of non-Kashmiri activists, especially those already involved in campaigns against the marginalisation of certain groups.