Review: The real cost of austerity

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2015

This paper draws on Berlant's (2011) concept of "cruel optimism" as it manifests itself in the lives of disabled people with learning disabilities living in England in a time of Big Society. We argue that Big Society offers a cluster of promises to disabled people with learning disabilities: citizenship, empowerment, community, social action and a route out of (or protection from) poverty. However, we suggest that these promises have been repeatedly offered and repeatedly denied and remain tantalizingly out of reach. While drawing attention to the injustices disabled people with learning disabilities face in Big Society, we also attend to the ways in which they are working the spaces of neoliberalism in order to resist "their designation as disposable bodies" (Tyler 2013: 224).

Tizard Learning Disability Review

The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased precocity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics. Keywords: disability; austerity; slow death; neoliberal-ableism

Disability & Society

This paper draws on feminist and queer philosophers? discussions of precarity and employment, too often absent from disability studies, to explore the working lives of people with learning disabilities in England in a time of austerity. Recent policy shifts from welfare to work welcome more disabled people into the job market. The reality is that disabled people remain under-represented in labour statistics and are conspicuously absent in cultures of work. We live in neoliberalable times where we all find ourselves precarious. But, people with learning disabilities experience high levels of uncertainty in every aspect of their lives, including work, relationships and community living. Our research reveals an important analytical finding: that when people with learning disabilities are supported in imaginative and novel ways they are able to work effectively and cohesively participate in their local communities (even in a time of cuts to welfare). We conclude by acknowledging that we are witnessing a global politics of precarity and austerity. Our urgent task is to redress the unequal spread of precaritization across our society that risks leaving people with learning disabilities experiencing disproportionately perilous lives. One of our key recommendations is that it makes no economic sense (never mind moral sense) to pull funding from organisations that support people with intellectual disabilities to work. Points of interest • Disability studies have always engaged with labour. • Many disabled people want to work but are not allowed. • The last five years of British political life have made things even worse, with disabled people finding it harder than ever to find work when opportunities for labour are scarce for everyone. • As work chances decrease, so opportunities for employment support level out. • People with learning disabilities find themselves in a precarious position in relation to the workforce.

Journal of Long Term Care

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Disability & Society, 2014

The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased precarity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics.

Disability & Society

The Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in many western economies implementing cuts in health and social care. This systematic review provides a holistic picture of the impact of austerity policy on the lives of people with learning disabilities (LD) and the collateral effects on the people who support them. Our review suggests that in the current climate of economic austerity, available funding to support people with LD is no longer aligned to their care needs. Cuts in disability services have adversely affected the wellbeing both of people with LD and their informal carers. Individuals with LD have lost social support and are experiencing increased social isolation. Heightened demands on family carers' time have negatively influenced their wider roles, including parental functioning, and labour market participation. Our review provides the foundations for further discourse and research on the effects of austerity on people with LD and their family carers.

‘We will look after you’: the radical promise of ‘the time after’ (Rancière) in recent theatre involving actors with intellectual disabilities. ‘We will look after you’, the last words of Back to Back Theatre’s Lady Eats Apple (Melbourne, October 2016) echo in the darkness of a space transposed: the audience on stage, the performers in the auditorium. The words are spoken by intellectually disabled characters/performers to another who is able but playing disabled. Intellectual disability in its social and political context underpins the genesis and evolution of the company, but in Lady Eats Apple it is a subject that is placed to the side, referred to obliquely, in favour of a more fundamental questioning of what it is to see, to hear and to be present in (post)theatrical performance, and what efficacy such performance might have. Throughout the production face microphones and individual audience headphones offer at once the intimacy and alienation of mediatized presence, the audience’s eyes are subjected to pulsating extremes of brightness and darkness, their sense of space is disoriented as successive envelopes of black and white inflatables give way to a final, utterly dislocating, reveal. Dramatic narrative and characterization are deconstructed in ‘theatricality,’ in Féral’s sense, that wavers unstably between theatre’s representation and performance’s presentation. After this destabilizing of the demarcations of identity and alterity: of performance and audience, of ability and disability, of mythos and myth, how are the closing words ‘We will look after you’ to be taken? They constitute a performative utterance made by people with intellectual disabilities to look after those without such disabilities: a complete overturning of conventional ethicopolitical relationships. They also represent the promise of a radical time after current political crises that threaten the eradication of compassion, empathy and egalitarianism. After Rancière, this time is neither utopian nor catastrophic, but that in which we take interest in the ‘sensible stuff’, the ‘material events’ against which hope and despair is measured.