Professor Nora Ellen Groce, an anthropologist, is Director of the UCL International Disability Research Centre at University College London. Known for her work in global health and international development with a focus on social justice, much of her work has concentrated on children and adults with disabilities. Professor Groce has done applied research on poverty, domestic violence, the disabling consequences of infectious diseases and access to health care for poor and marginalized populations. Now holding the Cheshire Chair at University College London, she was previously on the faculties of Harvard University (1984-1990) and Yale (1990-2008), where she helped establish and run the Global Health Programme before coming to UCL in 2008. Widely published, Groce also serves on a number of national, international and United Nations committees and advisory boards.
Disability Research, Policy and Advocacy: How can we cause more trouble?
Research, policy and practice which focuses on how disability intersects with global challenges is not new, although the scope and pace of such intersections have increased markedly over the past decade. However, the issue is not just how to generate better research, broader policy or more effective advocacy. The issue – and the challenge – is to improve how researchers, policy makers and practitioners working on disability issues can more effectively interact with and strengthen the voice of disability within broader global initiatives. The voice and concerns of people with disabilities and disability organizations must be central to all key issues – not just an afterthought. For this to take place, we must expand how we frame issues, how we participate in a range of networks and how we disseminate information, data and insights. For years, I have told my graduate students that good research should make a difference, and really good research should cause trouble. I will argue here that disability research, policy and advocacy needs to cause more ‘trouble’ - to take a more prominent role in all efforts to address global challenges.
Prof. Sébastien Jodoin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law of McGill University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment and serves as Associate Dean for Research. Drawing on his lived experience with multiple sclerosis, Dr. Jodoin co-founded and directs the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Programme, a pioneering initiative to generate, co-produce, and translate knowledge at the intersections of disability and climate justice. His work in this area has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and has been covered by media outlets around the world. He has won numerous awards and honours, including McGill University’s Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award (2024) and McGill University’s Changemaker Prize (2023), given to scholars whose dedication to sharing their expertise with the media and the public has significantly impacted society.
Is the Transition Accessible? The Intersections of Disability and Decarbonization
Governments around the world have committed to decarbonizing their economies to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. This major economic, political, technological, and social transition has considerable distributive implications for people with disabilities. In this talk, Prof. Jodoin will present data and case studies of how efforts to reduce carbon emissions have neglected and adversely affected people with disabilities. He will argue that a disability-inclusive approach to climate mitigation can help ensure that climate policies dismantle, rather than reinforce, the barriers faced by people with disabilities in society.
Ville Kivimäki is the Research Director of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki, which is a major research, publishing and memory organization in the humanities. Kivimäki is a social and cultural historian of the Second World War and its aftermath. In his research, he has focused on traumatic war experiences, military psychiatry and the war’s long-term effects in individual lives as well as in the postwar society. He is specialized in studying emotions, experiences, memory, gender and trauma as historical phenomena. In 2018–23, Kivimäki led the “Lived Nation” research team in the Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University.
Contested Disabilities – The Case of Wars’ Traumatic Effects on Human Mind
Traumatic effects of war-related violence and loss became a mass-scale phenomenon in the 20th century. While the wars have caused vast mental suffering also earlier, the globalization of psychiatry has led to an internationally standardized psychological concept of war trauma, defined as post-traumatic stress disorder. This has not, however, been a linear development story, neither globally nor locally. There has been great variation both in trauma responses and their treatments; and many now-axiomatic features of war trauma have been hotly debated and contested. It has not been always evident, for instance, whether trauma is a psychological wound or whether it is rather a somatic ailment – or whether trauma is a medically-founded disorder at all. The history of war trauma over the past 120 years reveals changing attitudes towards disability, from punishment to care and from moral evaluations to medicalization. Maybe most importantly, the case of war trauma underlines those changing societal and cultural factors that define and shape something as a disability in a given context – and thus influence the historical experience of disability as well.
Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric & Composition) at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as Director of the Disability Studies Program, as well as co-founder of the Transformative Access Project. She is the author of the books Crip Spacetime (Duke University Press, 2024; open-source) and the award-winning Mad at School (University of Michigan Press, 2011). During Spring 2022, she was in residence at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden on a Fulbright Grant to study universal design and collective access. Read more at her website, http://margaretprice.wordpress.com.
What Does It Mean to Gather?
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic alerted the world to the costs—and the joys—of gathering, disabled people have been finding innovative ways to come together. We chat asynchronously; we meet on Zoom for dances and hangouts; and we haunt each other’s histories across space and time. In this presentation, Prof. Price shares data from over 300 participants in the Crip Spacetime study, asking, What do “gathering” and “inclusion” mean in the present moment, when so many of us are separated by systemic inequities and violences both global and local in nature? In closing, Prof Price outlines her new research project, in which participants work together in small groups to re-conceptualize what “access” and “inclusion” might mean when we come together in gatherings.
María Soledad Cisternas Reyes has a Degree in Law and Master in Political Science. She is a lawyer, law professor and researcher.
Ms. Cisternas is a member of the Chilean Advisory Council of the National Human Rights Institute and the director of Dignitem Foundation. She is highly acclaimed and was the Special Envoy of UNSG on Disability and Accessibility (2017 - June 2023), Chairperson of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the United Nations (2013 - 2016), Member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2009-2016) and member of the United Nations Ad-Hoc Committee that developed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2002-2006)
She was awarded the National Human Rights Prize, Chile, in 2014 and the International Human Rights Award, the American Bar Association of the United States (ABA), 2022.
Universal Accessibility in the era of digital transformation.
The 21st century presents a great challenge regarding the use of digital technology in the world. So that persons with disabilities are not left behind, it is essential that digital technology be designed and produced in an accessible manner, and must be available and affordable for users.
Accessible digital technology is a fundamental support for the exercise of rights such as information and communication; legal capacity; public participation; education; job; and the right to independent living and to be included in the community, among others.
The presentation analyzes the link between these rights and accessible digital technology, which emerges from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the General Comments of the CRPD Committee and its jurisprudence, as well as the Agenda UN Sustainable Development Goal 2030.
The main actors responsible on digital accessibility will be indicated.
The presentation concludes with the results of the Summit on the Future, especially the UN Global Digital Compact and its link to persons with disabilities.
Note: During the presentation, short videos on the topic will be shown, produced by Professor María Soledad Cisternas Reyes.
Mr. Tuomas Tuure works as the Advocacy Coordinator of Abilis. Abilis is a Finnish foundation working for the rights of persons with disabilities in the Global South. As the advocacy focal point, he coordinates Abilis advocacy work within Finnish sphere and the key international stakeholders including multilateral actors and OPD’s.
Tuure previously coordinated development cooperation within the Finnish NGO sector and has held many positions within the civil society sector related to human rights of persons with disabilities. Tuure has extensive experience of working in more than 52 countries on topics such as disability in conflicts, humanitarian assistance, peace and security and livelihoods.
Tuure is currently a member of “Global Action on Disability” Steering Committee, and the Finnish Development Policy Committee.