Education Policy and Social Justice

This Analysis Report was commissioned as part of the Disability Under Siege Network+ Grant Ref: AH/T005440/1 funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The research was undertaken by researchers and faculty from the Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) part of Birzeit University. ICPH was established informally as Palestinian social action was emerging at the end of the 1970’s, then as a formal university unit, a department, and as an institute in 1998. Its mission and goals have been primarily defined by the extra-ordinary conditions of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The institute's inception, growth and development were a response to the Palestinian community's need for generating the evidence required to develop independent and informed health policies, plans and programmes.

ICPH aims to contribute to the protection and improvement of the health of the Palestinian population through research, teaching the MPH and Diploma programs, and the capacity building of public health providers and planners. Its theoretical foundations are based on the notion that health is socially constructed; and on understanding health and disease in context, taking shape over the life course. Medical services are considered important for achieving health, but not sufficient, requiring additional action outside health services and within community and society to address the structural factors that influence health and well-being, such as economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental influences on health.

The definition of disability has evolved over time away from the biomedical and charitable and perceived as inside the person, towards understanding disability as linked to the living environment, which can able or disable people, increase or decrease their capabilities, and equalize or not equalize opportunity. Various measures can be used to assess disability status among persons and societies, depending on the purpose of such assessments. In the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) the Washington Group questions are used in censuses to estimate the number of Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) in the population which can be compared to other population groups, and where the census also identifies the cause of disability, which in the oPt (West Bank and Gaza Strip) also relates to various types of exposure to violence by the Israeli army and ongoing and chronic warlike conditions.  The 2017 census results indicate that, using the narrow Washington Group definition of disability, there are over 90,000 PWDs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with at least 2500 reporting that their disability was due to direct Israeli army violence. Other measures should be used to estimate the degree of need for entitlements. Yet despite the rise of disability activism in the 1980’s, and the promulgation of the 1999 Disability Law which provides PWDs with access to a range of entitlements, various entitlements set by the  Law were still not implemented at the time of writing this report. In 2019, this Law was updated to reflect changes in conceptions of disability, from the biomedical and charitable, to a rights based definition and understanding, with the new Draft Law still being debated in early 2021. Attempts to understand how disability is measured by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, crucial for the provision of entitlements, were met with failure. The lack of transparency, high centralization, excessive bureaucratization and control from the top and dysfunctionality, are all systemic problems affecting not only the health sector and our attempts to understand the workings of the system, but other sectors as well. The paper concludes by identifying some of the gaps requiring future research and interventions.

The purpose of this literature review is to provide a map of the research landscapes regarding people with disabilities and disability provision more broadly, in Jordan. The aim is to provide a foundation in which to inform the commissioning stage of the Disability Under Siege project.
The main areas of focus for the review will be, education, health, the arts and culture, and intersectional perspectives. The research highlights the challenges that disabled people still face in terms of inclusion and full participation.

This literature review is part of the project ‘Disability Under the Siege’, a programme bringing together a community of researchers, educational practitioners, cultural institutions, advocacy organisations and disability led groups in the UK and Middle East. The project aims to contribute to research efforts by providing intellectual and logistical resources that local practitioners need to transform education provision for children with disabilities in conflict-affected countries.

The literature review which is focused on Lebanon, comes as a first step to map and understand the situation of persons with disabilities in general but more pertinent to this study, is the research carried out in this field. Thus, this review comprises the academic, medical, and grey literature regarding disability in Lebanon. It also includes key insights from meetings with disability community activists to shed light on what is done, and not done, for people with disabilities in Lebanon as well the mobilization efforts done for and by people with disabilities in Lebanon.

The Palestinian art and cultural scene is beset by multiple local and international concerns. The prevailing social, political, and economic volatility has created significant instability within the arts sector that impacts upon cultural production, visual representation, and cultural infrastructure alike. Palestinian art and culture have historically contributed to the representation politics of archiving and the continued pursuit of change in the future. To date, however, there has been sporadic engagement with the issue of disability. The issue of disability has not thus far been a critical issue that cultural organizations and art practitioners engage.

Nonetheless, the number of artistic and cultural practices and projects relating to disability seems to be growing in Palestine. Several cultural partnerships with disability-led organizations are already in place. Research-led practice in the arts has been also increasing in the past few years, encouraging interdisciplinary within the arts in other sectors, and further activating the role of art in social- and community-based forms of exchange. In addition, several art and cultural institutions are paying more attention to their physical spaces, and facilities to become more inclusive and accessible.