(DIS4b) Sociology of Disability II

This session broadly explores the sociology of disability. Tags: Disabilities, Equality and Inequality, Health and Care

Organizers: Chris Churchill, University of Lethbridge, Yiyan Li, University of Toronto; Chair: Karen Foster, Dalhousie University

Presentations

Michelle Owen, University of Winnipeg; Jeremy Wildeman, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

A House Divided: Disabilities, Inequalities, and Shared Futures

Systemic inequality in housing remains a significant and neglected problem across Canada. The Government of Canada’s historic 2019 National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) legislates the right to housing. As one of only a handful of countries with such legislation for housing, the NHSA sets Canada apart as a global normative leader. However, there is one significant barrier to achieving the right to housing in this country, namely the discrimination faced by disabled people when accessing and remaining in appropriate housing. Ensuring the right to housing implicates issues such as the availability of affordable and accessible housing, the supports required by people with disabilities to remain housed, the availability and appropriateness of income supports to sustain tenancy arrangements, as well as fair adjudicative processes surrounding evictions. To date, the barriers to the right to housing for disabled people have been largely unexplored, despite 27% of Canadians being disabled and the significant intersection between housing insecurity and disability. Through original research, including interviews with people with lived experience and service providers, and an expansive grey literature review, this presentation elucidates those barriers nationally, and provincially in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia. The lack of attention given to this issue makes it difficult to ascertain why a significant proportion of people experiencing homelessness have disabilities. Our Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project ‘The Right to Housing for Tenants with Disabilities in Canada’ seeks to fill this empirical gap through an examination of the varying experiences of discrimination encountered by disabled Canadians and the strategies used to deal with these barriers. We aim to contribute to a research agenda concerning the right to housing for disabled people in Canada and how the ongoing experiences of discrimination and basic affordability are preventing people with disabilities from realizing their right to housing. We will do this by identifying the ways in which discrimination and the denial of appropriate housing can be changed through additional supports for people living with disabilities, as well as policy and legislative changes. Our project, and this presentation, focuses on the right to housing for disabled people and asks three broad research questions centered on the experience of discrimination by people with disabilities in the context of securing and maintaining appropriate housing. First, how do disabled people experience the right to housing across Canada? Second, what discriminatory barriers do people with disabilities face across Canada? Third, what supports, procedural or process changes, and revisions to laws, policies, and programs, will help disabled people overcome these barriers to the right to housing? These questions are being explored through emancipatory research, and purposeful partnerships between academic researchers in multiple disciplines and community organizations. The theoretical approaches taken by this research cross sectors and are deeply intersectional and interdisciplinary. This research promotes an understanding of the right to housing as described in Canadian and international law. It also adopts the social and human rights models of disability and explores the mechanisms of law and policy related to housing, disability, social justice, and the lived experience of marginalized and disadvantaged groups who experience discrimination. As such, our theoretical approaches are rooted in the ‘right to housing’ concept. This research also adopts a mixed methodology, and project activities form four overlapping strands to explore the right to housing for disabled people. We do not have any firm conclusions yet as we are in the preliminary stages of data collection and analysis. Thus far we have been focusing on network development, direction setting, knowledge exchange, and capacity-building. However, our literature reviews support our argument that Canadians with disabilities are discriminated against in terms of attaining and maintaining adequate housing. The narratives we gather through semi-structured interviews with people with lived experience of disability will enrich the literature. This presentation is highly relevant to both the theme of Sustaining Shared Futures, and the focus of the open session of the CSA Sociology of Disability Research Cluster on Disabilities, Equality, and Inequality. In this presentation we consider the sustainability of our shared futures in the context of disabilities and housing. The current situation is inequitable and must be challenged and changed. Canadians with disabilities have the right to housing.

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Non-presenting author: Jewelles Smith, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights; Kristen Hardy, University of Winnipeg and Brandon University; Jon Paul Mathias, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

Karen Foster, Dalhousie University; Laura Fisher, Dalhousie University

Time and Agency in the Care/Work Narratives of Families with Disabilities

There is a large and well-established field of social scientific research that seeks to measure and make sense of how families balance the many and sometimes conflicting claims on their time, and how these claims, and their attendant responses, feelings, negotiations and strategies are gendered. Over time, the field has grown more sensitive to the diversity of families we can try to understand, and the complexity of how households divide up the work that keeps them running. Researchers have showed, for instance, that “time is not time is not time” (Doucet, 2022)--problematizing simplistic time-use calculations–and that gender differences in household and care work are not always the same as gender inequalities (Doucet, 1995). In this paper, we seek to add to this still-expanding field by contemplating how to make space for the positive and negative implications of disability–children’s and parents’--in our analysis of parents’ care/work narratives, with additional attention to how their care/work relations, and the control they have over them, may change and vary over time at multiple scales -- within a day, but also the life course (Elder, 1994). Like a growing number of researchers (Hanisch, 2013; Thomas, 2022), we seek to carve a space between the ‘deficit narrative’ approach that focuses attention on all the ways in which disability limits parents’ and children’s agency and flourishing, and a naive approach that ignores their challenges. Our more specific objectives are to explore the relationships between temporality (at multiple scales) and agency in disabled families’ stories, to help us understand care/work experiences in families with disabilities, and to point to helpful interventions or supports. To that end, we draw on 17 interviews from a larger Canadian cross-national project that includes a national survey (with almost 5000 participants) and a follow-up qualitative research project with selected participants from the survey (with 88 households and 155 participants) on gender divisions and relations between unpaid work and paid work in diverse families. Data collection utilized the Care/Work Portrait (Doucet and Klostermann, 2023), a visual participatory method for exploring how individuals and couples navigate and negotiate all the work that goes into running a household. Data analysis Team-based data analysis work used an adapted version of the Listening Guide approach to narrative analysis.

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Non-presenting authors: Andrea Doucet, Brock University

Shahina Parvin, Brandon University

Racialized immigrant women's pain and damage and their psychiatric disordering and healing in a prairie city Lethbridge, Canada

In this paper, I present findings from in-depth interviews with 13 racialized immigrant women mental health service users in a prairie city, Lethbridge, Canada. The women’s narratives demonstrate that their use of mental health services is linked to their suffering and damage resulting from post-immigration struggles, racialization, gendered norms, domestic and sexual violence, and discrimination in workplaces in Canada. The suffering these women experienced could be seen as a response to their life situations. Yet, without an explanatory framework about those situations, lacking adequate ‘local cultural’, social and economic supports, and finding themselves situated in a society where psychologization and pathologization of suffering are normative, the women instead doubted their cultural ways of living, performativity, identity and ability to achieve a western neoliberal way of living, ‘productive life’ and ‘ideal sane self’. The women went to physicians and/or psychotherapists seeking solutions, drawing upon western psychiatric discourses of suffering and madness. Most of the women in this study were diagnosed with anxiety disorders and/or depression by their physicians, though a few self-diagnosed, drawing upon lay discourses on the medicalization of mental distress, and illustrating their compliance with psychiatric conceptualizations of their problems as individual, biological and pathological. While most of these women sought mental health services due to pain that I suggest is itself a product of neoliberal/settler colonial and heteropatriarchal culture, the psychiatric treatments prescribed by their physicians functioned to further encourage several women to assimilate to these misogynist and imperial structures in order to function ‘better’ as workers, students, mothers, wives, and social beings. Despite differences in their suffering, diagnoses, and use of mental health services, these women worked on themselves to reach a ‘normal life’ and ‘ideal self’ within their discriminatory structural settings. Drawing on these narratives, in this paper, I respond and extend critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarships on madness that claim about the ways in which normative suffering has been constructed as mental disorders, and the ways that psychiatric knowledge, categorization and treatments are gendered and imperialist. I suggest that in order to better address these folx’s suffering, it is important to understand intersectional power relations that played an important role in contributing to these women’s damage.

Evan Wicklund, Carleton University; Olivia Boonstra, Canadian Centre on Disability Studies (Eviance)

Moving Towards More Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Experiences for Students with Disabilities: Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals

In 2021, researchers at Eviance (Canadian Disability Studies Incorporated) undertook a three-year project entitled “Innovating for Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Education (PSE): A Pathway to Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”. This collaborative project brought together three community partners from Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs) and three academic partners to advance the SDGs related to quality education (SDG #4) and decent work (SDG #8). Project objectives were based on the premise that collaboration across universities and colleges which scale up innovative and inclusive approaches to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is essential for realizing inclusivity in both PSE institutions and places of employment (Fovet, 2021; Meyer et al., 2014; Murphy, 2021). The objectives of the project include supporting Canada’s efforts to meet the SDGs as a pathway to decent work by closing gaps in the knowledge and skills of key stakeholders in PSE concerning inclusive education. These high-level tasks included: undertaking research about how UDL practices are experienced by diversely located students and graduates with disabilities (La Dyiur and Bair, 2018); generating and sharing information about innovative practices in UDL (Evans et al., 2017); creating and distributing digital resources and creating opportunities for collaboration on UDL for PSE excellence in diversity; fostering and increasing collaboration across Canadian universities, colleges and DPOs; and, establishing an accountability and monitoring framework for use by participating universities and colleges, and for subsequent use by PSE institutions more widely. In this session, researchers from Eviance will share our project findings and speak about our experiences managing our collaborative multi-year project. Specifically, we will outline conclusions from our activities, which include, but are not limited to: a) a primary analysis of the Government of Canada’s Survey on Disability pertaining to PSE; b) two literature reviews, one on the transition from PSE and decent work and another on UDL in PSE; c) an analysis of the experiences of students with disabilities gathered from a survey of over one thousand participants; d) a secondary analysis of the National Education Associate of Disabled Students (NEADS) townhall meetings about the barriers to inclusive PSE; and, e) a total of nine national social labs, where we brought together diversly located stakeholders (students, administrators, faculty, members of accessibility and accommodations offices, etc.) to address barriers and create innovative solutions regarding inclusivity in PSE and decent employment. We will also discuss strategies for working collaboratively with our partners and other contributors over the three-year period and share considerations about future work for advancing the SDGs. Our goal in this presentation is to summarize the impact our project has made, but also to initiate a dialogue with the broader disability studies community and seek to establish connections with other scholars and advocates interested in equitable initiatives in PSE and decent work. More specifically, we focus on the benefits and issues related to student activism (Bruce, 2020), intersectional and reflexive approaches to inclusivity in PSE (Beck et al., 2014) and the need for co-creation between students, faculty, and administrators to ensure inclusive practices for all students are sustainable (Gilles and Dupuis, 2013).