Rune Sarromaa Hausstätter, PhD, Lillehammer University College, Norway When placed in special education, the famous philosopher and cartoon hero Bart Simpson expressed his concern about the challenge he was supposed to overcome: how can I catch up the others by…
Christopher A. Riddle, Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Director of the Institute of Applied Ethics, Utica College, NY, USA, email: cariddle@utica.edu Nearing the end of 2011, The Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel on End–of–Life Decision Making released a detailed report…
Hisayo Katsui, Senior Researcher, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Following the United Nations (UN) Decade of Disabled Persons between 1983-1992, the first African Decade of Persons with Disabilities started in 1999 and ended in 2009. The first…
Róisín Dermody, independent researcher and disability activist, Dublin, Ireland Abortion is a highly contentious issue when the debate focuses on a woman’s right to choose and the right to life of the unborn child. However, when the decision to abort…
Hannah Morgan, Lecturer in Disability Studies, Lancaster University, UK 1st May is celebrated throughout the Nordic countries and beyond as a day of celebration and activism linked to our shared heritage in the international labour movement. Since 2006 it has…
Simo Vehmas, Professor of Special Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, President of NNDR In this blog entry, I will discuss very briefly two related and controversial questions that, in my view, arise from the neurodiversity perspective: first, whether neurodiversity has…
Philippa Rieck, PhD researcher, Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research, University of Glasgow, UK Channel 4 in the UK has currently been running the very popular ‘One Born Every Minute’ which attempts to show the ‘real life drama’ that occurs in…
Bjarne Bjelke Jensen, Consultant, The National Resource Centre on Disability and Social Psychiatry, Denmark On February 9th 2012, a rather unique event took place in Denmark. The Danish “Resource Centre on Disability and Social Psychiatry” arranged a conference on knowledge arenas…
Magnus Tideman, Professor of disability research, University of Halmstad, Sweden The changes that have taken place for persons with intellectual disabilities in Sweden from the beginning of the 1990s until today are characterised by a number of clear trends. Institutional…
Gregor Wolbring, Associate professor, Dept. of Community Health Sciences, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of Calgary, Canada, Email: gwolbrin@ucalgary.ca As I see it, the theoretical framework and analytical lens of Ableism is a gift from the disabled people rights movement…