In this article we offer an analysis of a deeply problematic and troubling dual aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic: how disability is being understood within normative accounts of health and medicine to frame, interpret, and respond to its spread and implications; what are the terms of inclusion and exclusion in altered social life in the COVID crisis; and how people with disabilities fare. We find disturbing indications of disablism and oppressive biopolitics in the 'enforcing of normalcy' that frames and dominates COVID reconstruction of social lifea situation that we suggest needs urgent deciphering, critique, and intervention.

Background Over the past 2 decades, online forums for mental health support have emerged as an important tool for improving mental health and well-being. There has been important research that analyzes the content of forum posts, studies on how and why individuals engage with forums, and how extensively forums are used. However, we still lack insights into key questions on how they are experienced from the perspective of their users, especially those in rural and remote settings. Objective The aim of our study was to investigate the dynamics, benefits, and challenges of a generalized peer-to-peer mental health online forum from a user perspective; in particular, to better explore and understand user perspectives on connection, engagement, and support offered in such forums; information and advice they gained; and what issues they encountered. We studied experiences of the forums from the perspective of both people with lived experience of mental illness and people who care for people with mental illness. Methods To understand the experience of forum users, we devised a qualitative study utilizing semistructured interviews with 17 participants (12 women and 5 men). Data were transcribed, and a thematic analysis was undertaken. Results The study identified 3 key themes: participants experienced considerable social and geographical isolation, which the forums helped to address; participants sought out the forums to find a social connection that was lacking in their everyday lives; and participants used the forums to both find and provide information and practical advice. Conclusions The study suggests that online peer support provides a critical, ongoing role in providing social connection for people with a lived experience of mental ill-health and their carers, especially for those living in rural and remote areas. Forums may offer a way for individuals to develop their own understanding of recovery through reflecting on the recovery experiences and peer support shown by others and individuals enacting peer support themselves. Key to the success of this online forum was the availability of appropriate moderation, professional support, and advice.

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Widely and intensively used digital technologies have been an important feature of international responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. One especially interesting class of such technologies are dedicated contact and tracing apps collecting proximity data via the Bluetooth technology. In this article, I consider the development, deployment and imagined uses of apps in two countries: Singapore, a pioneer in the field, with its TraceTogether app, and Australia, a country that adapted Singapore’s app, devising its own COVIDSafe, as key to its national public health strategy early in the crisis. What is especially interesting about these cases is the privacy concerns the apps raised, and how these are dealt with in each country, also the ways in which each nation reimagines its immediate social future and health approach via such an app.

Children with disabilities, especially those from the Global North, often figure into public discourse as beneficiaries of the “digital revolution.” However, if children’s voices and experiences are generally under-considered in digital policy and rights debates, this is even more likely when it comes to disability. Against this background, this article looks at the global rights of children with disabilities in the digital age. We consider the state of digital inclusion and exclusion, as well as the intersection between children’s rights and disability rights. Moving forward, we suggest ways to reconceptualize digital and related rights inclusive of all children.

While clearly not intended to do so, the Paralympics and the notion of disability associated with them provides significant opportunity for ethical reflection on how far society has not come regarding disability. Yet, this opportunity to explore disability has rarely been taken up. Instead, the overwhelming representation of people with disability within mainstream media is found in portrayals of brave, elite athletes who overcome their disability. As has been suggested by earlier studies of media and disability, such media representations fit well within the established power relations which oppress people with disability in society. While there have been some changes and improvements, we contend that, overwhelmingly, the separation between the Paralympics and Olympics is not questioned, and that if the Paralympics are reported at all, disabling media representations still very much persist.

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In this paper, I look at the Apple iPhone as a fascinating instance of adaptation, especially as it relates to digital cultures. A theme in the rise of the mobile, or cell, phone has been how it underscores the active role that people play in the orchestration and use of culture. The gambit of the iPhone is that the mobile phone itself will be decisively remade, and through this that media culture will itself be reformed. To make sense of this rapturous reception, I examine the iPhone as a notable instance of consuming culture. The paper discusses the double sense in which the iPhone functions both as a signal adaptation of the mobile phone at the same time as it introduces new practices and politics of adaptation. Adapting the mobile phone: The iPhone and its consumptionAlthough a mere three decades old, the cellular mobile phone is an important location of contemporary culture and its reproduction and variation. In this paper, I wish to consider cultural adaptation through a discussion of the mobile phone. My case study is the Apple iPhone. Introduced in mid-2007 to much acclaim, the iPhone is an excellent example of adaptation because it is explicitly conceived as an intervention into the styles and genre of contemporary culture -notably mobile phone cultures, Internet cultures, and the broader scenes of digital culture, and what it represents for cultural transformation in general. Moreover, the iPhone and the terms of its introduction have put strong emphasis on the active roles that people play in orchestrating and using mobile, digital cultures.The cellular mobile phone was first and foremost an adaptation of the telephone. This process itself spanned the best part of the twentieth century, drawing together various complex revisions: the reworking of radio technologies and radio spectrum; the remediation of the telegraph; the reimagining of mobility; and the acoustical recrafting of voice telephony for the portable instrument. The 1980s is broadly the period in which the classic form of the mobile phone was stabilized. By this I mean that the decisive shift to a stand-alone portable telephone in this decade of the first-generation analogue mobile phone provided the material basis for a set of new affordances and design features that are now regarded as standard for a cell phone (Goggin 2006). In the 1990s, when the secondgeneration digital mobile system took over, the cell phone became smaller, more portable, more domestic and closer to the body (Fortunati 2006), and this was accompanied by the inclusion of new features, capabilities and communicative architectures, as well as cultural expectations and routines, into this pocket-sized technology. In the 1990s, the cell phone became part of everyday life, and loomed large in the conjuring of those involved in design and fashion, and entertainment and media, as much as the worlds of telecommunication.