Barriers to realising disabled people’s rights in the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe

Description

In this talk, I will first present a framework for a critical and historically informed analysis of the barriers to realising disabled people’s rights – as codified in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) – in the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe. I have called this framework ‘Postsocialist Disability Matrix’ and I have developed and refined it in my previous work by bringing together disability studies, Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, and critical studies of postsocialism. This has helped understand the barriers to disabled people’s rights in the region in terms of intersections between state socialist legacies and postsocialist neoliberal transformations in the economic, cultural, and political spheres. After presenting my framework, I will discuss specific barriers to realising the rights codified in the CRPD, including continuing institutionalisation, retrenchment of public support, medical-productivist framing of disability, weak disability organising, overvaluation of self-sufficiency, and depoliticisation of disability initiatives. I will also mention some more recent challenges resulting in social abandonment amidst the intersecting crises afflicting present-day Europe, and particularly its postsocialist region.

Period	27 Jun 2024 → 28 Jun 2024
Event title	Notes from the Margins: Human Rights-Related Activism, Advocacy, and Humanitarianism in Southeast Europe
Event type	Workshop
Location	Münster, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International