Disability

Disability

Disability

1 August 2019Review

The New Press, 2017; 272 pp; $25.95

The field of disability studies has never gained much traction in the popular sphere. Of course, this would not come as a surprise to someone like Sunaura Taylor who knows all too well that societies are primarily built by and for able-bodied people, and that disabled people are some of the most neglected and marginalised people in the world.

In this semi-autobiographical work, Taylor outlines with great patience what a disabled person is, and can be, in a similar way to Lynne Segal’s…

1 October 2018News in Brief

Deaths linked to benefit claims may have doubled in the last two years, according to information obtained by Disability News Service through freedom of information requests.

The department for work and pensions (DWP) carries out secret inquiries, which they call internal process reviews (IPRs), into deaths and other serious and complex cases linked to DWP activity. There were nine IPRs involving the death of a claimant between October 2014 and January 2016. There was a jump to 33…

1 October 2018News in Brief

At the end of July, Disabled People Against Cuts held an ‘International Deaf and Disabled People’s Solidarity Summit’, Disability News Service reports. This was a counter-conference to the first ‘Global Disability Summit’, also in East London, co-hosted by the British and Kenyan governments.

DPAC also held a disabled people’s ‘festival of resistance’ outside the official event, to expose the impact of the British government’s austerity policies on disabled people in Britain.…

1 August 2018Feature

Esther Leighton explains why she's been forced to take to the courts to enforce the 2010 Equality Act

Currently, I’m suing a whole street. Or, at least, that’s what people say; the actual reality is more complicated than that.

I’m a disabled person; I’ve got several linked invisible conditions and also a genetic condition as a result of which I’m a powered wheelchair user. While the world has changed positively for disabled people, the pace of that change has slowed enormously in the last 10 years, and in some areas it’s gone backwards. The Equality Act 2010 (which followed the…