Important methodological questions are raised by the act of researching disablement. Disability research has attracted much methodological criticism from disabled people who argue that it has taken place within an oppressive theoretical paradigm and within an oppressive set of social relations. These issues are of heightened significance for non-disabled researchers and bear many similarities to those faced by researchers investigating barriers to the social inclusion of women, Black and 'Third World' peoples. Such challenges have led to the development of an 'emancipatory' research paradigm. Six principles of emancipatory research are identified and the authors' own research projects are critically examined within this framework. A number of contradictions are identified and an attempt made to balance the twin requirements of political action and academic rigour.
Direct payments have been heralded by the disability movement as an important means to achieving independent living and hence greater social justice for disabled people through enhanced recognition as well as financial redistribution. Drawing on data from the ESRC funded project Disabled People and Direct Payments: A UK Comparative Perspective, this paper presents an analysis of policy and official statistics on use of direct payments across the UK. It is argued that the potential of direct payments has only partly been realised as a result of very low and uneven uptake within and between different parts of the UK. This is accounted for in part by resistance from some Labour-controlled local authorities, which regard direct payments as a threat to public sector jobs. In addition, access to direct payments has been uneven across impairment groups. However, from a very low base there has been a rapid expansion in the use of direct payments over the past three years. The extent to which direct payments are able to facilitate the ultimate goal of independent living for disabled people requires careful monitoring.
Access to the Internet has become a sine qua non-of everyday life. It also offers new routes to economic and
This paper addresses the challenges of building capacity for collaborative participatory research with disabled people's organisations in European countries. The paper presents initial findings from the project 'European Research Agendas for Disability Equality' (EuRADE), which seeks to build the capacity of civil society organisations to participate in future research collaborations in partnership with academic institutions. The findings draw on survey data identifying the research capacity, needs and priorities of 68 organisations in 25 countries and focuses, in particular, on responses from national or European level representative organisations of disabled people. The findings demonstrate a high degree of motivation and readiness for collaboration in academic research but raise concerns about the readiness of academic institutions to engage disabled people as equal partners within social model and rights-based approaches. Respondent organisations identified a wide range of research needs that raise challenges for collaborative responses from the academic community. In this way, the findings provide a basis for developing user-led agendas for European funded research within the emancipatory paradigm, and indentify important opportunities for new international research collaborations between activists and academics. Points of interest• Disabled people's organisations think that research is very important. They want to work together with researchers in universities but researchers do not really understand what disabled people want from research. • Some researchers talk too much about their ideas. They do not explain how to use these ideas in the real world. Researchers do not talk enough about the human rights of disabled people. Some researchers do not understand the social model of disability. • Disabled people's organisations want to be equal partners in research projects and to help decide what kind of research is done. • Disabled people's organisations have good ideas for new research projects. They can also help researchers to make their research findings more accessible. *Corresponding author. Email: m.a.priestley@leeds.ac.uk Downloaded by [FU Berlin] at 01:55 15 May 2015 732 M. Priestley et al.• Researchers should give more support to disabled people's organisations so that their ideas will have an effect on the kind of research projects that get money from the European Union.One of the key contributions of critical disability studies has been the development of foundational principles for a more 'emancipatory' paradigm of disability research -a paradigm in which the priorities of disabled people and their organisations could be more influential in shaping the academic research agenda. Since the inception of these ideas in the early 1990s there has been much discussion and numerous examples of academic research contributions that lay claim to emancipatory principles. However, there has been little development beyond the context of specific, often local, research studies. In particular, there has been no ...
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