Inclusion (disability rights) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

"Disability Art" and "dis/art", which are terms used to denote artistic expression by people with disabilities in pursuit of inclusion, each redirect here, where they can be dealt with in context. For an overview of some of the world's explicitly disability-inclusive arts groups, see disability in the arts
Disability in the arts
Disability in the arts is an aspect within various arts disciplines of inclusive practices involving disability, and manifests itself in the output and mission of some stage and modern dance performing-arts companies, as well as the subject matter of individual works of art, such as the work of...

. For the article on disability-focused media projects and portrayal of the disabled in mass media

Mass media

Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...

, see disability in the media
Disability in the media
The depiction of disability in the media plays a major role in forming public perception of disability. Perceptions created by the media informs the way people with disabilities are treated in society...

. For the academic study of disability, see disability studies
Disability studies
Disability studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary academic field focusing on the roles of people with disabilities in history, literature, social policy, law, architecture, and other disciplines. Although it has many antecedents, disability studies began to flourish toward the end of the...

. For the more general subject of disability rights, see disability rights. For disability advocacy in educational systems, see educational inclusion

Inclusion (education)

Inclusion in education is an approach to educating students with special educational needs. Under the inclusion model, students with special needs spend most or all of their time with non-disabled students. Implementation of these practices varies...

and mainstreaming. For other articles on inclusion see its disambiguation page.

Inclusion is a term used by people with disabilities and other disability rights advocates for the idea that all people should freely, openly and without pity

Pity

Pity originally means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and was once used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy"...

accommodate any person with a disability

Disability

A disability may be physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these.Many people would rather be referred to as a person with a disability instead of handicapped...

without restrictions or limitations of any kind. Although disability rights has historically existed as a relatively cohesive movement, the movement centered around inclusion has only recently begun to take shape and to position itself in the eye of the general public.

Examples now exist worldwide. In the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

it is symbolized most visibly in British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs like Ouch!, hosted by Mat Fraser

Mat Fraser

Mat Fraser is an English rock musician, actor and performance artist. Between 1980 and 1995 he was a drummer with several rock bands including Fear of Sex, The Reasonable Strollers, Joyride, The Grateful Dub, and Living in Texas, the latter of which had a number one single in Italy.- Life :Fraser...

and Liz Carr

Liz Carr

Liz Carr is a British actor, stand-up comedian, television presenter and international disability rights activist. She frequently refers to her disability in her stand up, and is frank about the difficulties inherent in doing so - "I've had some tuts, which is fantastic.....

, and in the associated comedy, variety

Variety show

A variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is an entertainment made up of a variety of acts, especially musical performances and sketch comedy, and normally introduced by a compère or host. Other types of acts include magic, animal and circus acts, acrobatics, juggling...

and/or stage acts in similar circles, such as Abnormally Funny People. In the United States New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

and San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

communities, the I AM PWD Project, the hip-hop group 4-Wheel City, the modern dance

Modern dance

Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century. Although the term Modern dance has also been applied to a category of 20th Century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance.-Intro:...

ensembles AXIS Dance Company

AXIS Dance Company

AXIS Dance Company is a professional physically integrated contemporary dance company and dance education organization founded in 1987 and based in Oakland, California. It is one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with...

and The GIMP Project, and the stage theater companies Theater Breaking Through Barriers

Theater Breaking Through Barriers

Theater Breaking Through Barriers , formerly Theater By the Blind, is an inclusive theater company in New York City that strives develop the talents of individuals with disabilities for work onstage, backstage, in the office and in the audience. It began in 1979 as sighted actors recording plays...

, Visible Theater and Nicu's Spoon, are all part of this emerging phenomenon. Lawrence Carter-Long, a nationally acknowledged US social advocate and orator in the disability rights field with spastic diplegia

Spastic diplegia

Spastic diplegia, historically known as Little's Disease, is a form of cerebral palsy that is a neuromuscular condition of hypertonia and spasticity in the muscles of the lower extremities of the human body, usually those of the legs, hips and pelvis...

, founded and ran the disTHIS! Film Series in downtown Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

once per month for most of the year from 2005 through 2010. The series is now no longer active and it remains to be seen whether other leaders of the Disabilities Network of New York City will take over and re-launch the series from 2011.

The concept of inclusion emphasizes universal design

Universal design

Universal design refers to broad-spectrum ideas meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities....

for policy

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

-oriented physical accessibility issues, such as ease-of-use of physical structures and elimination of barriers to ease of movement in the world, but the largest part of its purpose is on being culturally transformational. Inclusion typically promotes disability studies

Disability studies

Disability studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary academic field focusing on the roles of people with disabilities in history, literature, social policy, law, architecture, and other disciplines. Although it has many antecedents, disability studies began to flourish toward the end of the...

as an intellectual movement and stresses the need for disabled people — the inclusion-rights community usually uses the reclaimed word "cripple" or "crip" instead — to immerse themselves, sometimes forcibly, into mainstream culture through various modes of artistic expression. Inclusion advocates argue that melding what they term "disability-art" or "dis/art" into mainstream art makes integration of different body types unavoidable, direct, and thus positive. They argue it helps able-bodied

Able-bodied

Able-bodied refers, in law, to an individual's physical or mental capacity for gainful employment or military service, and it is in this sense that the term is also used regarding eligibility for payment of child support or alimony....

people deal with their fears of being or becoming disabled, which, unbeknownst to the person, is usually what underlies both the feelings of "inspiration" and feelings of pity

Pity

Pity originally means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and was once used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy"...

s/he may have when watching a disabled person moving in his or her unusual way(s), or in participating in activities that obviously draw attention to the person's condition(s). Inclusion advocates often specifically encourage disabled people who choose to subscribe to this set of ideas to take it upon themselves to involve themselves in activities that give them the widest public audience possible, such as becoming professional dancers, actors, visual artists, front-line political activists, filmmakers, orators, and similar professions.

Mainstreaming

Mainstreaming in education

Mainstreaming in the context of education is a term that refers to the practice of educating students with special needs in regular classes during specific time periods based on their skills. This means regular education classes are combined with special education classes...

is typically limited to putting a person with a disability next to typical people in the usually quite vague and unspecific hope that each will adapt to and learn about the other. Inclusion, while acknowledging the value of mainstreaming as a tool, argues that this is not enough: the whole of society, its physical accessibility, and its social attitudes, they say, should exist with universal design

Universal design

in mind, thus ending physical marginalization of all kinds by ending the idea that a body that is different is incapable of self-management, physical attractiveness, and so on. This all-encompassing practice, its advocates argue, ensures that people of differing abilities visibly and palpably belong to, are engaged in, and are actively connected to the goals and objectives of the whole wider society, as opposed to being a "novelty" that 'normal' people might be afraid to ask direct questions of

Political correctness

Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...

.

The inclusive attitude is quite divergent from, and usually the exact opposite of, the prevailing attitude in most countries worldwide. Inclusion's opposite tends to be an attitude or undercurrent of pity

Pity

Pity originally means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and was once used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy"...

and/or sorrow

Sorrow

Sorrow may refer to:* Sorrow * Sorrow , an EP by The 3rd and the Mortal* "Sorrow" * "Sorrow" * "Sorrow" * "Sorrow" , also covered by The Merseys and David Bowie...

among the population of the able-bodied towards people with disabilities — and, among the medical community, a prevalence of the medical model of disability

Medical model of disability

The medical model of disability is a sociopolitical model by which illness or disability, being the result of a physical condition, and which is intrinsic to the individual , may reduce the individual's quality of life, and causes clear disadvantages to the individual.It is today specifically...

focusing on the physical and/or mental therapies

Physical therapy

Physical therapy , often abbreviated PT, is a health care profession. Physical therapy is concerned with identifying and maximizing quality of life and movement potential within the spheres of promotion, prevention, diagnosis, treatment/intervention,and rehabilitation...

, medication

Medication

A pharmaceutical drug, also referred to as medicine, medication or medicament, can be loosely defined as any chemical substance intended for use in the medical diagnosis, cure, treatment, or prevention of disease.- Classification :...

s, surgeries

Surgery

Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...

and assistive devices that might help to "normalize" or "fix" the disabled person so that they may have an easier time in their surrounding environment. The attitude of inclusion, which has a lot in common with the social model of disability

Social model of disability

The social model of disability is a reaction to the dominant medical model of disability which in itself is a Cartesian functional analysis of the body as machine to be fixed in order to conform with normative values...

, alleges that this entire approach is wrong and that those who have physical, sensory and/or intellectual impairments are automatically put on a much more effective and fulfilling road to a good, complete, and 'full' life if they are, instead, looked at and valued by society from the outset as totally "normal" people who just happen to have these "extra differences."

The prevailing pity-based attitude, as well as the physical inaccessibility, tends to be the case regardless of a country's industrialization; e.g., almost as much in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

as in Thailand

Thailand

Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...

there remains more in common attitudinally with pity than with inclusion. However, the reasons for this phenomenon being more the case in the United States than in similarly industrialized countries such as Canada and much of Western Europe

Western Europe

Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...

are not entirely clear. Some say that the older architecture of the United States' more prominent cities makes structural adjustment for disabled people costly and supposedly impractical, leading indirectly to a high measure of hostility towards disabled people lest they end up feeling 'entitled' to receive such adjustments automatically and unquestionably. Others tend to blame the attitude of Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...

more generally, accusing it of corrupting the attitude of able-bodied people in the U.S. in particular towards disabled people — often to the point that it prevents that country's culture from readily accepting disabled people in aspects and venues that are not directly legality

Legality

The principle of legality is the legal ideal that requires all law to be clear, ascertainable and non-retrospective. It requires decision makers to resolve disputes by applying legal rules that have been declared beforehand, and not to alter the legal situation retrospectively by discretionary...

or law

Law

-related, e.g. theater, film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, dance

Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting....

, and sexuality

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

. (See also the article Ableism
Ableism
Ableism is a form of discrimination or social prejudice against people with disabilities. It is known by many names, including disability discrimination, physicalism, handicapism, and disability oppression...

.)

Like the social movements of feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

, anti-racism

Anti-racism

Anti-racism includes beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism. In general, anti-racism is intended to promote an egalitarian society in which people do not face discrimination on the basis of their race, however defined...

and gay rights before it, inclusion is often derided by critics from the right as naïvité, and by critics from the left as identity politics

Identity politics

Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...

. As it looks less towards 'overcoming' and 'achieving', and more towards being and existing in the moment, inclusion by its very nature forces others in the world to possibly begin to actually accept bodily forms and processes they may not be immediately comfortable with.

The late Prime Minister Olof Palme

Olof Palme

Sven Olof Joachim Palme was a Swedish politician. A long-time protegé of Prime Minister Tage Erlander, Palme led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 to his assassination, and was a two-term Prime Minister of Sweden, heading a Privy Council Government from 1969 to 1976 and a cabinet...

of Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

, speaking at the Stanford University Law School in the 1970s, summed up the divergence between Swedish attitudes towards people with disabilities and the prevailing attitude in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

: the latter, he said, regard the able-bodied and the disabled as effectively two separate species; the former, as humans in different life stages wherein, just as all babies are cared for by parents, sick people by the well; elderly people by those younger and healthier. Able-bodied people are able to help those who need it, without pity, because they know their turn at not being able-bodied will come. Palme maintained that if it cost the country $US 40,000 per year to enable a person with a disability to work at a job that paid $40,000, the society gained a net benefit, because the society benefited by allowing this worker to participate cooperatively, rather than to be a drain on other people's time and money.

External links

Disabled Peoples' International (global inclusion network)
The Disabilities Network of New York City
Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts
American Association of People with Disabilities
Alliance for Technology Access
Center for Disability Law and Policy
Ragged Edge Online
"The Social Movement Left Out" - Z Magazine article by Marta Russell
On Exclusivity
Salva Vita Hungarian foundation working on inclusion of persons with mental disabilities, in Hungarian and English
The Bubel Aiken Foundation
Hallatlan Foundation Hungarian foundation working on inclusion of persons with hearing disability and popularization of Hungarian sign language, in Hungarian and English
Kids Together, Inc An unfunded volunteer non-profit promoting inclusion.
www.isja.org.uk Inclusion and Social Justice Articles
Dreams for Kids
Disability Studies Italy
An Italian online Review about inclusion
Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.