20世纪美国残疾人就业权利的缘起、制度化与困境

在某种意义上,20世纪的美国历史也是一部残疾人的民权运动史。如果说经济大萧条初步唤醒了残疾人的就业权利意识,两次世界大战开启了美国伤残军人康复与就业援助的机制建设,第三次科技革命则加速了残疾人就业权利保障的制度化进程。从公共就业计划、残疾人社会保障保险计划、补充收入保障计划,到《1973年残疾人康复法》,再到《1990年美国残疾人法》,残疾人的就业权利经历了被漠视、依附于福利救济、向实现平等权利转变等阶段,给美国的政治、经济、社会、思想领域留下了诸多挑战和值得思考的问题。由于法律在解决社会问题上存有局限、残疾人对各种福利保障资助的依赖、根深蒂固的偏见等因素,美国残疾人争取平等权利之路仍任重而道远。     

Winding Back Australian Women's Rights: Conventions,Contradictions and Conflicts

Since 1996, Australia's Coalition government has been involved in winding back women's rights. It has diluted the role of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, attempted to weaken the Sex Discrimination Act to allow for discrimination on the basis of marital status, and has refused to provide Australian women protection through the international realm via the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In taking these steps, the government has not only placed rights in conflict against each other but has also been contradictory in its approach. The attempts to wind back women's rights demonstrate the fragility of existing rights protection measures in Australia more generally and suggest the need to consider alternative rights protection mechanisms such as sex equality guarantees in a bill of rights.     

Disability Policy and the Media: A Stealth Civil Rights Movement Bypasses the Press and Defies Conventional Wisdom

The Americans with Disabilities Act was pushed through Congress with far less attention from the media than has accompanied other major civil rights bills. This was part of a deliberate and unconventional strategy by disability rights lobbyists who believed that media portrayals of disability were so cliched that journalists would impede, not further, the public's understanding of disability rights issues. Despite the success of the strategy, there is a price to pay for having been a 'stealth' civil rights movement: Now that the law is in place, disabled people face a backlash from Americans who neither understand the ADA nor the need for civil rights protection for disabled people.     

Undue Hardship and Reasonable Accommodation: The View From the Court

Title I of the Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits employment discrimination against disabled people. This article provides an overview of how the courts have interpreted the duty to accommodate an individual with a disability, focusing on the concepts of "reasonable accommodation" and "undue hardship."     

Comparative Analysis of Civil Society and State Discourse on Disabled People’s Rights and Welfare in Southeast Asia 2010–16

Over the next quarter century it is likely that Southeast Asian countries will experience high levels of growth in the number of disabled people. It is therefore significant that, over the past decade, the region’s governments have at last ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). At this critical juncture, and in the face of ongoing human rights issues in several territories, this study presents comparative analysis of state and civil society organisations’ (CSOs’) discourse on CRPD implementation. The findings show that while governments have espoused a participatory approach to fulfilling their CRPD obligations, contemporary practice falls short. Disabled people currently experience barriers to shaping policy and accessing social welfare. There is a “disconnect” between state and civil spheres that hampers effective implementation based on partnership working and knowledge exchange. In turn, this raises issues of legitimation, performativity and the endurance of the Medical Model of Disability across the region.     

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.     

The Viability of the United Nations Approach to Economic and SocialHuman Rights in a Globalized Economy

The United Nations approaches economic and social human rights through a framework of legal positivism. States are called on to respect, protect and fulfil their legal obligations contained in international human rights law. The state remains ultimately responsible for guaranteeing these economic and social human rights. This article explores the viability of this statist approach in this era of economic globalization. The less developed countries often face economic deprivation caused not by state action/inaction but by the global economic system itself. In many key respects states appear to be losing their capacity to regulate their economies and labour markets effectively. Yet despite the shrinking nature of our global community, the state is still central in the creation of the proper environment for the fulfilment of these rights. This article analyses the national strategies that governments can pursue to respect, protect and fulfil the economic and social rights of their citizens, and thus meet their international legal obligations.     

Challenges and Dilemmas in Implementing the Americans With Disabilities Act: Lessons From the First Decade

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 represents a strong national commitment to protecting the full rights and opportunities of persons with disabilities. This article traces evidence of the impact of the ADA's implementation and compliance during its first decade.     

New cultural geographies of disability: Asian values and the accessibility ideal

The ideal of a 'barrier-free environment' is promoted in developed countries as a means of increasing the independence and mobility of disabled people. The adoption of this concept for developing countries requires critical analysis. Indonesia, for example, has formulated a physical access code, but has not succeeded in the implementation. The focus of this article is on middle-class professional disabled people in cities in Indonesia. Indonesian collectivist values and unequal status that arise from the feudal system do not encourage independence. Such values and the restrictive and inadequate public infrastructures render disabled people invisible in public. The availability of maidservants and chauffeurs assists urban disabled people from the middle class. They may be professionals, who desire to be independent in mobility and other daily living activities. Ambulant disabled people are also excluded from social life due to the custom of squatting and sitting on the floor for household work and traditional socializing. As a result of these factors and the current unstable social, economic and political conditions in Indonesia, barrier-free design is not a priority in most planning and design and seems futile in its realization.     

Free speech,toleration and equal respect: the Bolt affair in context

It is a rare moment when free speech becomes a potent political issue within the Australian polity. But the Andrew Bolt affair, the Abbott government's subsequent move to repeal §18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), and its ultimate abandonment of this reform, is one of those moments. This article seeks to place these political events in a broader political and philosophical context, investigating how the conflicts and tensions to which these events gave rise can be understood in terms of competing perspectives within a wider liberal tradition, producing rival imperatives centred on free speech and equal respect. The differing priorities which these competing liberal perspectives placed on free speech and equal respect give rise to two very different conceptions of toleration, and its application within liberal democracies.     

Recovering a ‘Subjugated History’: Disability and the Institution in the Industrial City

The paper explores physically disabled people’s experiences of institutions in the industrial city, focusing on the case of nineteenth-century Melbourne. Here ‘institutions’ refers to the panoply of public, semi-public, private and charitable places that were established in industrial cities to house, and frequently confine, a diverse estate of poor, ill, elderly, disabled and otherwise socially dependent persons. The aim of this paper is to retrace the institutional experiences of disabled people in nineteenth-century Melbourne, with a view to explaining the role of the institution within a broader ‘social space of disability’in the industrial city. In particular, the analysis seeks to identify the type of institutions that disabled people were admitted to, including places of confinement such as gaols. The paper also explores how disabled people coped with the ‘duty to attend the asylum‘ (after Foucault) that weighed heavily on socially marginalised people in the industrial city.     

State politics,railroads, and Civil Rights in South Carolina, 1883–89

In 1889 the General Assembly of South Carolina repealed the state's Civil Rights Act (1870), following a protracted debate that had been prompted by the United States Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). This article examines in detail the contours of the civil rights controversy in South Carolina and, in doing so, identifies a number of competing dynamics, among them outside corporate interests (in this case, railroads), local state interests, and regional loyalties. Taken together, these different factors demonstrate conclusively that civil rights in South Carolina during the 1880s was a contested space. They also shed important new light on the development of de jure segregation in the South and, in particular, the complex relationship between Jim Crow legislation and the social and economic issues related to railroad expansion.     

Taking the Local: The Reagan Administration, New Federalism, and Fair Housing Implementation

This article explores how "New Federalism" under President Ronald W. Reagan manifested itself in the implementation of fair housing policy. We examine the Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) and how it led to state and local civil rights agencies playing an increasingly vital role in implementing the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Relying on data provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), we show that a significant number of fair housing complaints were shifted from HUD to state and local agencies.     

Rosemary Kennedy: the importance of a historical footnote

In most accounts of the Kennedy family, Rosemary, John F. Kennedy's eldest sister, has been discussed only in passing. In fact, there is much in Rosemary 's story that is instructive in regard to the effort families take to cope with disability, the impact of the social environment on such efforts, and the impact of a disabled member on the family as a whole. Rosemary's presence within the Kennedy home may have been a much more important component of the family' rise to prominence than most scholars appear to believe. This article describes Rosemary's place within the family, attempts by her parents and siblings to cope with and obfuscate her condition, and her possible impact on family dynamics.     

“Nobody’s children?”: the Ministry of Pensions and the treatment of disabled Great War veterans in the Irish Free State, 1921–1939

This article analyses the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled Irish Great War veterans who lived in the Irish Free State. To do so, it utilises the records of the Ministry of Pensions, the British governmental department, that was charged with assisting these men. This research argues that the Irish Free State was a particularly challenging society for disabled ex-servicemen to reside. Yet, whilst the social and governmental reception on offer to disabled Great War veterans was less favourable in the Free State than their similarly afflicted former comrades in Britain, they were better able to benefit from substantial assistance from the Ministry of Pensions. The department lived up to its billing as an “imperial obligation” in the newly formed state.     

Women's policy networks and the Infanticide Act 1922

This article examines the reason for the passage of the 1922 Infanticide Act, arguing that it owes much to the influence and work of women's policy networks. Historians have disagreed as to why the Act was passed with relative suddenness in the early 1920s, at a time when infanticide was generally considered a much less pressing social issue than it had been in Victorian England. Moreover, several Bills brought between 1908 and 1913 proposing that the law on this subject be amended so that women who killed their newborns no longer faced the death penalty had all failed. Importantly, the roles of juror and lay magistrate had become open to women in 1920, following the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. The public interest generated by a case of newborn murder tried at the Leicester Assizes in 1921 (particularly amongst women's organizations, including the suffragette group the Women's Freedom League) led several leading women with political connections to push for a change in the law. Without the pressure these women could bring to bear on civil servants and politicians, attempts to bring in new legislation on infanticide would have been postponed well into the twentieth century.     

Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

Critiquing the heteronormativity of the banal citizen in New Zealand's mediated civil union debate

This article extends Billig's (1995) landmark thesis on banal nationalism by considering how processes of national deixis circumscribe the boundaries of citizenship and forms of belonging within nation-states. Drawing on critical analyses of sexual citizenship, the article provides a discursive analysis of the debate over civil union in the New Zealand mainstream press during 2004–2005. It argues that this mediated debate represented an historical moment where the routine deictic flagging of the nation, and the correlated flagging of the ‘banal citizen’, fundamentally broke down, thereby allowing this unmarked and ‘ordinary’ process to be systematically examined. Four major discourses are identified in press coverage: ‘Homosexual’ subjects as abnormal and disordered, tolerance, equality and human rights, the sanctity of marriage and the preservation of the family (and the social order). Although the passing of the Civil Union Act does mark a (faltering) step forward in sexual equality, we argue that the presence of these discourses suggests that forms of both ontological and cultural heterosexism persist in New Zealand society. Despite the Act conferring new legal rights, ultimately we conclude that the four discourses act to restrict the extent to which ‘homosexual’ subjects are considered ‘valid’ and ‘legitimate’ citizens. In continuing to structure the public politics of sexual citizenship in New Zealand, these discourses have influenced recent debates over legislative moves towards ‘marriage equality’ in ways that raise concerns over the continuation of heterosexist norms, as well as exclusionary forms of homo-nationalism. More generally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of Billig's work as a valuable and productive analytic lens to explicate concerns over the exclusionary nature of citizenship itself.     

EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes – tenure building and renewal processes – are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.