Ethical Code

This article examines practices and ideologies that underline the social construction of the “disabled child” in Tanzania. In doing so, it questions the way in which both local and international social actors define certain categories – such as “disability” and “care”; as well as the relationship between those categories and the development policies. The Tanzanian government tried to keep up with global policies to the benefit of disabled people in vain. Therefore, private individuals and NGO sectors filled the void. What does this mean for disabled children and their families? This is the question behind the fieldwork. The paper follows case studies that allow highlighting how local beliefs and practices are questioned when the disabled child attends school or when an orphanage takes care of a child. Ethnography let us to critically ponder over the agency and vulnerability experienced by the subjects involved, including minors, even when their own lives are at stake.

Keywords: Childhood Disability; Tanzania; NGO; Special Education; Stigma.

The following piece addresses the key role of social representations theme in the construction of inclusive cultures. In fact, if the world of disability is still described today from stereotypes and prejudices, socially built, it is necessary to give voice to the narratives of people in order to be able to falsify some beliefs. The essay presents particularly the results of a research conducted with University of Perugia students with disabilities with the aim of investigating the dimension of narrative identity and the characteristics of their life project.

Keywords: Disability; Narrative Identity; Agency; Communion.

Among the Nzema of Ghana evil is always caused by external agents, often of supernatural type. The rise of evil is a sign of social order subversion. Physical disability is perceived as result of a taboo breaking, disrespectful actions against deities or ancestors and, more generally, adoption of antisocial behaviors. A physically challenged represents an evident and permanent guilt sign for his family group, who is constantly highlighted before their community by the presence of the “disabled” body. Nzema moral order exercises a regulatory social function and has a prominent role in spreading a negative perception about disability, which has an effect on many aspects belonging to everyday life, by contributing to the social exclusion process of physically challenged. An habitus is “imposed” on a person with disability. Countless negative labels “were affixed” to him. Habitus and labels are the result of an organizing action that acts on the human body from the outside, not only through conceptions, but also through local perceptions that shape a given habitus. This paper wants to provide a cross-section of a specific local world, where moral order collides with the global processes, creating movements and laws to promote people with disability rights.

Keywords: Disability; Antisocial Behavior; Natural and Spiritual Disease; Local Perceptions and Conceptions; Local World.

The analysis of children’s literature allows us to known which representation of disabled child are offered in children’s book. This paper offers the analysis of a corpus comprised of 24 books published in Italy for children from 3 to 8 years old. The selected boos have been published from 2009 to 2018. We described the kind of representation of children’s disabi-lity that the books propose. Thematic analysis reveals topics: the disability representation; the description of the protagoni-st; the mediator character who helps the protagonist.

Keywords: Representation; Children’s Literature; Disability.

The prison is the institution of Bentham’s panopticon where you can see without being seen. Prisoners under surveillance are subjects to a criminal law that has sentenced them and governs them. It is because they are criminals that criminal law is applied and surveillance is used, and this is what establishes their condition as prisoners. Delinquency is no longer seen in terms of a statement but of the enunciation: prisoners are criminals, as the categorization speaks up for themselves. The methodology of enunciation becomes an ethnomethodology as a form of specific investigation in contexts of deviance, and gives account of the interplay of biopolitics of disabled bodies and their active micro-stories collected during the psychologist research in the CDT in Parma and in the detention facility. In applying Murphys’ theory of liminality and the social deviance of “social stigma” by Goffman, two different models of detention will be compared to see how these individuals have incorporated and activated the rhetorics of narratives about “disability”, “impairment”, “handicap” and the family similarities related to them. How can their micro-stories be exemplary of the forms of life of disability in detention? How has the institution performed their being and acting? A medical anthropology in detention proves more necessary than ever as a tool to seize, alongside structural violence and its incorporation, the forms of life it encompasses. 

Keywords: Moral Economy; Biopolitics of Disability; Medical Anthropology; Prison Psychology; Liminality and Stigma.

This paper aims at exploring the way in which categories of disability are shaped – and reshaped – and negotiated on the field through the dialectic between local and global representations and policies. The article is based on a long-term fieldwork in the urban setting of Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray in Northern Ethiopia. As a developmental state, Ethiopia puts in action a series of interventions with the goal of development and through its paradigm. Local agents of development assume that the problems experienced by the disabled people are the consequence of a lack of understanding, a “backwardness” and a “carelessness” of the Ethiopian society. I will reflect on this as a rhetoric and, analyzing the local discourses but even the institutional one as an historical and political product, I will try to shed lights on the great divide between institutional discourse and the real life of disabled people. Finally, it appears that the lack of infrastructures, the structural violence that nourish a vicious circle of poverty and debility, are more relevant than the so called “cultural attitudes”.

Keywords: Disability; Development; Ethiopia; Tigray; Debility.

The essay focuses on the summer stays organized by the Health and Welfare Service in favour of people with intellectual disabilities. The ethnographic point of view allows to highlight two readings: a positive, surface image, and a negative, deeper image. Disability is seen as a camp (Bourdieu) where the different social actors act and stage different points of view and related strategies, power dynamics, symbolic violence. The aim is to show how summer stays, that want to be a service offered to the user, end up becoming a camp of subjugation of bodies: users, in particular those with intellectual disabilities, are rejected as people, and remain bridled, together with their families, in a real double bind (Bateson). They stop claiming their rights and users become docile bodies within a dispositive (Foucault), or a “dispositive” – considering that it acts under a positive image of disability – in which there are no responsible but which also makes the assistants and the staff who organize the same summer stays victims.

Keywords: Anthropology; Double Bind; Ethnography; Governmentality; Intellectual Disability. 

Università degli Studi di Napoli

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

The proposed paper draws on the experience gained with the project “Social Inclusion and Disability: experimentation paths for the Personal Health Budget” (L-inc) that aims to enhance the direct participation of people with disabilities in the decision-making processes that concern their healthcare. This objective is achieved through the promotion of a more person-centered care and a personalization of the allocation of economic resources, that are designed to meet the health and wellbeing needs and outcomes expressed into individuals’ life projects. In the last decade, the international debate on the ability of social and health services to respond to citizens’ needs has focused on the important role played by those reforms aimed at putting people to the center of public services, thereby promoting a personalization of care. Also in Italy citizens’ participation experiences had self-empowerment as main objective and it has been acknowledged the importance of enabling subjects to have the maximum degree of control about the support they receive in order to enhance citizenship for all.
After providing an overview on the evolution of the concept of disability, our paper shall present the tool of the Personal Health Budget, with particular regard to the adopted methodology, namely participatory research. 

Keywords: Personal Budget; Disabilities; Welfare Action; Empowerment.

This article is based on a qualitative anthropological research, conducted among the OPH (Organisations de Personnes Handicapées) of Western Senegal. The aim is to investigate the socio-cultural factors which influence the processes of social inclusion or self-determination of disabled people. By alternating the plan of cultural interpretation of disabilities and that of governance (connected to national protocols and international CRPD), a dialectic is established between urban and rural areas. Therapeutic pluralism, social stigma and microeconomic elements intersect in a complex system, in which the application of the conventions is about to perish. In this case the OPHs represent a possible solution which allows to build a network or even better a communitas that could support the diffusion of the CRPD’s principles.

Keywords: Medical Anthropology; Disability Studies; Senegal; CRPD; Communitas.

MUSAE (Museums, Social Use and Accessibility as a Contrast to Marginalization) is a two-year project funded by a banking foundation in Umbria, with the aim of building museum itineraries for accessibility of the exhibition spaces and usability of art for people with sensory and cognitive disabilities (blind and partially sighted, deaf, people with Alzheimer’s). Conceived and built in interaction with the main local associations of people with disabilities, the project is part of the broad framework of funding that the banking foundation dedicates to the so-called community welfare, placing itself in line with a now established trend that sees a shift from the public to the private sector in the availability of funds dedicated to interventions in the social and health field. In this way, a sort of third sector market is produced, materialized in the systematic practices of planning, evaluation, reporting of actions and their social and economic impact. In our work, referring to the design, coordination and research experience for community engagement activities aimed at establishing an operational network between partners and local realities, we will try to reflect from an anthropological perspective, on two lines of analysis distinct but intimately related to each other. On the one hand we will focus on the complex dynamics of the relationship between museum operators, managers of structures, artists and associations of people with disabilities with respect to the creation of usable contents such as videoguides in LIS, books in Braille, multimaterial works and synaesthetic performances of interpretation of some works. On the other hand, we will try to reflect on the impact that the reporting and evaluation systems established by the foundation have on the partnership and the actions of the project with respect to categories and values such as “accessibility”, “autonomy”, “community”, “welfare”.

Keywords: Disability; Design; Museums; Welfare; Economy.