Activism, Service Provision and the State's Intellectuals: Community Work in Australia H... more Activism, Service Provision and the State's Intellectuals: Community Work in Australia Helen Meekosha and Martin Mowbray Introduction Twenty years ago professional community work in Australia was largely regarded as a practice confronting inequalities. Community ...
This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in t... more This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state. As global social policy has been restructured along neoliberal lines in Western nations, the notion of ‘workfare’ has been widely promulgated. This paper draws on nine case studies from across Australia to explore how this has resulted in disabled women being coerced to participate in a range of workfare programs that are highly bureaucratised, sanitised and moralised. The findings suggest that with the advent of Australian neoliberal welfare reform, some disabled women are increasingly framed in negative affective terms. A primary emotion that appears to govern disabled women forced to participate in Australian neoliberal workfare programs is disgust. The experience of the participants interviewed for this study suggests that the naming of them in negative emotional terms requires disabled women to perform a respectable unruly corporeality to ensure that they gain and maintain access to a range of services and supports, which are vital to their wellbeing.
Disability studies, with their direct challenge to theories of alterity, subaltern status and ide... more Disability studies, with their direct challenge to theories of alterity, subaltern status and ideologies of domination, open up ways of examining cultural diversity that cannot otherwise be approached. This paper examines disability studies as a position from which multicultural ...
Activism, Service Provision and the State's Intellectuals: Community Work in Australia H... more Activism, Service Provision and the State's Intellectuals: Community Work in Australia Helen Meekosha and Martin Mowbray Introduction Twenty years ago professional community work in Australia was largely regarded as a practice confronting inequalities. Community ...
This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in t... more This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state. As global social policy has been restructured along neoliberal lines in Western nations, the notion of ‘workfare’ has been widely promulgated. This paper draws on nine case studies from across Australia to explore how this has resulted in disabled women being coerced to participate in a range of workfare programs that are highly bureaucratised, sanitised and moralised. The findings suggest that with the advent of Australian neoliberal welfare reform, some disabled women are increasingly framed in negative affective terms. A primary emotion that appears to govern disabled women forced to participate in Australian neoliberal workfare programs is disgust. The experience of the participants interviewed for this study suggests that the naming of them in negative emotional terms requires disabled women to perform a respectable unruly corporeality to ensure that they gain and maintain access to a range of services and supports, which are vital to their wellbeing.
Disability studies, with their direct challenge to theories of alterity, subaltern status and ide... more Disability studies, with their direct challenge to theories of alterity, subaltern status and ideologies of domination, open up ways of examining cultural diversity that cannot otherwise be approached. This paper examines disability studies as a position from which multicultural ...
"Until recently social work education in Australia has either marginalised or neglected disabilit... more "Until recently social work education in Australia has either marginalised or neglected disability by omission. Given the increasing number of disabled people in the community, the teaching of social work within a disability studies emancipatory paradigm as an essential part of the curriculum is long overdue. As many social work educators have suggested, we are at a critical moment in Australia, where the policy environment in which social work is embedded has largely been reframed in line with neoliberal trends. For disabled people, this has meant an ongoing state campaign to diminish disability entitlements, from decreasing disability social security regimes through to the rationalisation of adult disability support and care schemes. Social workers are negotiating the competing demands of these policy constraints alongside the needs of the disabled people they work with. New moral dilemmas have emerged where they are actively""faced with the question of ‘who to serve?’."
Attitudes towards disabled people are deeply embedded in the cultural order. The distinction betw... more Attitudes towards disabled people are deeply embedded in the cultural order. The distinction between "normal" and "disabled" sits as one of the most widely spread dichotomies, part of the awareness produced in socialization of children, and then conveyed throughout the ...
Indigenous Australians have experienced the horrific consequences of European invasion and coloni... more Indigenous Australians have experienced the horrific consequences of European invasion and colonisation. Some of these consequences include wars, geographic displacement and attempted genocide. Both the high prevalence and experience of disability among Indigenous peoples remain directly linked to the events that followed European invasion. Critical Disability Studies and Media Studies can investigate the process of decolonisation. This chapter is cross disciplinary in so far as we are concerned with the representation of Indigenous people in the mass media and decolonising Indigenous disability. We examine data collected from an analysis of the print media during the colonial period; that is, representation of " disabled " Indigenous people in mainstream newspapers during the first 100 years of the press from 1830. We use Martin Nakata's Indigenous Standpoint Theory and Decolonising frameworks to deconstruct and analyse the material collected.
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