Georgia van Toorn

Participatory approaches including co-design are seen as a means to address some of the challenges digital government poses for people with disability, such as unequal access and poor technological design. Yet co-design principles are rarely practiced in a meaningful way for people with disability, resulting in digital government systems that are obstructive and inaccessible to many. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of disability inclusion through a qualitative case study of participatory digital government in Australia. It centres on the case of "Nadia", an artificially intelligent virtual assistant created in 2016 through a co-design approach that ultimately ended in failure, as the project never progressed beyond the design stage. Based on research involving interviews with technology developers, government representatives, and people with disability who had input into the design of Nadia, the article makes three main contributions. First, it clarifies conceptually the importance of inclusion as a process, rather than an outcome, of digital government, reframing design as a matter of inclusion. Second, in examining why the project failed, the paper identifies aspects of digital government culture, organization, and practice that impede disability co-design, namely, a lack of institutionalized support and resistance to sharing power. Third, it highlights disability as an area for exploring new possibilities with technology and its limitations, showing the significant role that disabled people play in shaping technology and its advancements.

This article examines the impact of algorithmic systems on disabled people’s interactions with social services, focusing on a case study of algorithmic decision-making in Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Through interviews and document analysis, we explore future visions and concerns related to increased automation in NDIS planning and eligibility determinations. We show that while individuals may not fully comprehend the inner workings of algorithmic systems, they develop their own understandings and judgments, shedding light on how power operates through the datafication of disability. The article highlights the significance of addressing epistemic justice concerns, urging a reevaluation of dominant modes of understanding and assessing disability through algorithmic categorisation, while advocating for more nuanced approaches that acknowledge disability’s embeddedness in social relations. The findings have implications for the future use of algorithmic decision-making in the NDIS and disability welfare provision more broadly.

In many liberal welfare states, market-based reforms aimed at enhancing competition and choice in disability services have necessitated extensive regulatory reforms to ensure quality service provision. This article explores how the changing regulatory environment surrounding an individualised funding scheme is transforming frontline disability work. Drawing on data from a survey of 2341 Australian disability support workers, the article contributes to sociological understandings of market regulation by foregrounding the importance of frontline workers’ labour to the regulation of social service markets. Various regulation-related tasks and duties are identified which, while practically embedded among the client-focused components of care work previously documented, are analytically distinct from them. This category of undertheorised, unrecognised, often unpaid work is referred to as ‘regulatory labour’. The article illuminates the mechanisms through which workers enact and resist re...

Informal caregiving for a person living with glioma can be both rewarding and multidimensionally challenging, given the potential for debilitating symptoms, cognitive impairment or personality changes, as early as diagnosis. There is growing evidence that, due to the demands of care, experiences and feelings of loneliness and isolation among informal caregivers are widespread, and opportunities for quality or meaningful social connectedness are lacking. While considerable research has quantified the causes and effects of loneliness and isolation in informal care contexts, the lived experience of loneliness has received relatively little attention. The aim of this study was to better understand the everyday experiences of a group of home-based informal caregivers of people living with glioma in Queensland, Australia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 informal caregivers, purposively sampled, and recruited through a tertiary hospital, in this paper, we explore how the various exp...

When young women who have grown up in contact with child protection become mothers, they shift from being regarded as a child ‘at risk’ by the child protection system, to posing ‘a risk’ to their baby. In contrast to their peers, young care leavers transition to adulthood with very few resources and little support; they typically continue to experience the economic and related adversities of their childhoods. This article draws on biographical narrative interviews with young Australian mothers to understand how they navigate child protection as new mothers. We argue that, while inequalities endure, new understandings of the system can be acquired and dispositions can adapt to function more effectively in the field of child protection. We draw on Bourdieu’s notions of capital, habitus and field to analyse young mothers' adaptations, with additional insights from Hester’s analogy of separate planets to explore their experiences of the field of child protection.

How and why neoliberal policies spread across political jurisdictions is a fundamental question for economic geographers and critical policy scholars. Many accounts inspired by the policy mobility approach point to neoliberalism as having a conditioning effect on the ease and speed with which policies transverse the globe. Yet the role that social movements and transnational advocacy networks play in shaping and at times facilitating neoliberal policy diffusion has been under-examined. In this article, I bring a new perspective to the policy mobilities literature, by incorporating insights from radical feminist and critical disability theorising. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, I argue that in their haste to scrutinise and theorise neoliberalism as a project of the Right, policy mobility scholars have neglected the mobilising role of the transnational left. Elements of the Left have leant critical support to market-based models of state restructuring, out of concern for minority rights and the welfare state’s denial of individual agency and choice.
To illustrate my argument, I use a case study of the disability movement and the policy model of individualised funding, which is driving the current trend towards greater marketisation in the provision of disability services.

A comprehensive national response to violence against women with disabilities is long overdue in Australia. Work to date suggests that the issue is endemic yet largely invisible. Responses at the national level are hampered by the lack of information regarding violence against women with disabilities due to under‑reporting and inadequate capture of the prevalence of this violence. This article explores approaches to collecting data regarding violence against women with disabilities in Australia and adds to the limited body of knowledge about the prevalence of violence for these women through interrogation of available data. Further analysis of the 2012 Personal Safety Survey data indicates that among women with disabilities aged under 50, 62 per cent have experienced violence since the age of 15, and women with disabilities had experienced three times the rate of sexual violence in the past 12 months compared to those without disabilities. These findings still do not represent the full extent of violence against women with disabilities, since the Personal Safety Survey samples only women who reside in private dwellings and excludes those living in disability care settings. Insight is offered as to what is needed to comprehensively capture the required data and the implications for policy.