In the United Kingdom, the “New Labour” administration that came to power in 1997 has promoted two models of partnership between the state and the voluntary sector. The civic engagement model is based on the renewed interest among governments in the potential of voluntary organizations to contribute to the civic engagement of citizens. In the service delivery model, voluntary organizations are recruited to the task of delivering core social services. Drawing on data from disability-related voluntary organizations in Northern Ireland, this paper illustrates the impact of the service delivery partnership model on the development of voluntary action in the welfare field, and the relative paucity of resources allocated to participatory voluntary action and civic engagement. The consequent impact on the development of partnerships between the state and the voluntary sector is discussed.

Despite policy calling for compulsory education in China, many children with autism are not in school. This article examines the establishment of autism-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China to meet needs not being met by the state. We focus on the background and motivation in founding and running these NGOs, after first considering the broader context of state decentralization and NGOs roles in supplementing welfare needs in reforming societies, and the educational policy context of China. This study used mixed methods, including questionnaires with open-ended and limited choice questions, and follow-up discussion email. The goals of NGO leaders—more than 50% of whom are parents of children with autism—are to make up for where government implementation of educational policy is insufficient; help others and advocate for inclusion in society; and do meaningful work. Implications from these findings are discussed.

This paper has a twofold focus: to establish a method of assessing the potential social impact of arts and disability projects and to apply this method to ten such projects. It does so by using a newly developed ‘ripple’ model that conceptualises social impact in terms of the development of active citizenship on the part of all participants over time. The model identifies ten factors (programme activity, welcoming, belonging, programme social values, individual social values, programme networks, individual networks, skills and creativity, programme wider social impact, and individual wider social impact) which evolve through four progressive stages. The original model is empirically adapted for application to arts and disability projects. Qualitative data were collected in the form of interviews, surveys and media reports across ten case studies, each representing a major arts and disability project offering a professional outcome for an external audience. The qualitative data were coded to provide a simple scoring tool for each case. The results support the application of the model in this context. Furthermore, findings indicate three critical conditions which enable projects to generate considerable positive social impact beyond the individual; ensemble in nature; project embeddedness; and networks and partnerships.

The organisation and financing of services dominate long-term care policy and research. This article argues for reorientation towards the social determinants of long-term care and the inequalities they generate. Building on Dahlgren and Whitehead’s influential equivalent for health, the article offers a framework for understanding how inequalities in long-term care need, access and experience are shaped by social networks, living and working conditions, services and policies, social norms, and political, economic and environmental conditions. International evidence on inequalities in need, access and experience is reviewed, and new analysis is presented for England, based on analysis of the Health Survey for England and the Adult Social Care Survey. Socio-economic inequalities are associated with steep gradients in need. Combined with unequal access to formal services, this results in more unmet need among disadvantaged people and a greater weight of responsibility on their family and friends. The final section explores the implications of a social determinants’ perspective for long-term care: addressing ‘upstream’ drivers of need (including social protection, housing and neighbourhood regeneration); inclusion and empowerment agendas; and ensuring that services effectively compensate for, rather than re-enforce, inequalities.

People with disabilities in the US are now a health disparities population. Though 25% of US adults have a disability, only 5% of medical research grants are disability related. Knowledge about researchers’ perceived barriers to including people with disabilities in research has focused on a single disability/condition and thus has limited translational science applications. Our CTSA’s Disability as Difference: Reducing Researcher Roadblocks (D2/R3) project examined such roadblocks towards inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). I/DDs are broad, heterogeneous conditions that originate in childhood, have varying impact and function, and persist throughout the lifespan. Strategies that mitigate their under-representation in research will likely have general applicability to all disabilities. In D2/R3’s first phase we conducted semi-structured interviews with translational science and I/DD program leaders at ten US institutions about perceived barriers and facilitators to including people with I/DD in research. Interviews were held with 25 individuals from partnering Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Centers, University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, and Clinical and Translational Science Award programs. Collaborative thematic coding identified key themes as: attitudinal barriers (e.g., assumptions about consent capacity), logistical barriers (e.g., accommodation costs), health disparities, and generalizability concerns. Findings informed development of a survey based on Prosci’s ADKAR® model of change management’s five components: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. Exclusion appears to stem from researchers’ lack of awareness, misconceptions, and knowledge gaps rather than insurmountable obstacles.

On my account, dehumanization is the act of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. When this occurs, it is never complete, because those that dehumanize others cannot avoid recognizing their humanness. Consequently, dehumanization involves regarding others as both fully human and fully subhuman beings. Inferences about dehumanizing states of mind are based on interpretations of human behavior. A Davidsonian account of interpretation has it that we interpret behavior in such a manner as to make it maximally coherent, rational, and consistent. In contrast, a Freudian account of interpretation has it that the human mind is largely incoherent, irrational, and inconsistent. The dichotomy between Davidsonian and Freudian hermeneutic strategies accounts for disagreements between realists and skeptics about dehumanization, because of dichotomous interpretations of the testimony of perpetrators and victims. Skepticism about dehumanization often invokes an Objection from Strangeness to call into question such testimony. However, Objections from Strangeness rely on questionable commonsense psychological assumptions.

A growing number of Medicaid programs have expanded to employ family members to provide long-term home care to individuals with disabilities, challenging the traditional wisdom that the law systematically denies the economic value of family caregiving. This article qualitatively studies a novel dataset of fair hearing records arising out of one of these programs—New York State’s Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP)—and makes two contributions to the literature on care, disability, and the welfare state. First, this article explores the new public/private boundary of care when the state limitedly expands its public care responsibility by compensating some family caregiving, providing a more nuanced picture of how the legal system both values and undervalues care. Second, it contributes to disability law scholars’ debate about medicalization by studying how medicalization works as a state legibility project in the context of state-supported disability care. Especially for traditionally undervalued social goods such as care, medicalization provides some metrics, albeit highly constrained, to make its value visible. Meanwhile, through capturing care recipients and their families’ more expansive understandings of care’s value, this study reveals the constraints of these metrics and supports making the relational dimension of care legible to the state.