Se Kwang Hwang

Making the Familiar Strange and Making the Strange Familiar: Understanding Korean Children's Experiences of Living with an Autistic Sibling.

Based on the findings of a small‐scale study using visual ethnographic techniques with nine South Korean children, this article explores the role of culture in understanding autism. While autism is embedded within the ‘strange’ and ‘unfamiliar’, linked to exclusion and discrimination in Korean society, the children focussed on reframing their experiences of living with autism as ‘ordinary’. Despite the limitations of the small sample, the richness and depth of data generated by children themselves offers new insights into children’s interpretations and experiences of autism and raises interesting questions for cross cultural research in the field of disability.

Enterprising? Disabled? The status and potential for disabled people’s microenterprise in South Korea

This article explores the position, potential and scope for self-employment and microenterprise for disabled South Koreans. The chronic barriers experienced in disabled people gaining paid work suggest that self-employment and enterprise might offer a good alternative to paid work. The self-determined nature of running a microenterprise has been shown to connect with disabled people who may not conform to standardised notions of body and brain that underpin many mainstream work contexts. Despite this promise, several barriers continue to beset disabled people’s access to micro-enterprise activity; barriers ranging from Confucian precepts, to employment protections that are geared largely towards paid employment and to the lack of training, finance and business support for disabled people starting up and sustaining microenterprise in Korea. The extension of legal protections, meaningful start-up subsidies, better business support and bridges between paid work and microenterprise are all seen as important policy correctives that would better support disabled people.

Flexible and personalised? An evaluation of a UK tailored employment support programme for jobseekers with enduring mental health problems and learning difficulties

The employment position of people with enduring mental health issues and learning difficulties (intellectual impairment) is a major policy and moral challenge. The continued exclusion from paid work for those disabled people who are otherwise keen to work is marked in Western Europe even in high per capita welfare states. The paradox here is that disabled people have received policy and programme attention, but arguably programmes have become increasingly ‘corporeal’ and medicalized. Condition management programmes (CMPs) epitomize this approach and focus on getting the sick and disabled body/brain more work-ready ahead of wider supports. By way of contrast this article presents the results of a large-scale evaluation of a non-medicalized approach in the UK which concentrated on careful job matching, intensive support and barrier reduction. It argues that flexible personalized approaches will afford greater employment success than a focus on deficits and welfare dependency reduction.

Disabled people, choices and collective organisation: examining the potential of cooperatives in future social support

Major shifts in funding, demography, personal expectations and the rise of a global disabled people’s movement require new and creative solutions to the choices and rights agenda into the twenty-first century. Direct payments and the individual employment of personal assistants is one clear and recognised path to independent living. However, there have been some reservations about the nature, process and impact of the broader personalisation agenda more generally within which direct payments and personal budgets are located. Some commentators point to the loss of the collective impulse in personalised approaches – ideas that were central to the development of the independent living movement and its founding principles. Some countries have seen the rise of collective responses to direct payment developments. This is explicable in terms of a suspicion of individualist underpinnings of personalisation coupled with a collective vision of social life. This article is based on an exploratory study of collective approaches in the field of direct payments where choice and social solidarity are being combined. Drawing on developments in Sweden, England and Wales, the article aims to inform possible future debates about direct payments and cooperative approaches and argues that greater user-control is not inimical to enhanced collective action.

Home movies in participatory research: children as movie-makers

Visual methods with children have gained interest as social researchers search for participatory methods that align with the current conceptualisation of children as social agents. This paper describes the reflections and experiences of using the home movie as an innovative vehicle allowing access to children’s everyday life. This method was adapted and used to encourage high levels of child-led participation and minimise researcher input. This paper explores practical and methodological strengths, challenges, and ethical questions arising from the production of home movies by the children and suggests that the home movie is an acceptable means for generating insight into children’s perspectives and to produce and reflect visual representations of children’s social worlds.

Valuing disabled children and young people: research, policy and practice: Valuing disabled children and young people: research, policy and practice, edited by Berni Kelly and Bronagh Byrne, London, Routledge, 2017, 184 pp., £100.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-13-868708-0

and perspectives to describe identity elements of people relations with media. For her, experience includes all of the variable conditions of any media encounter, ranging from material artefacts and physical positions to the goals, motivations and interest of the individuals (162). Ellcessor tries to define experience from the view of Cultural Studies, as she cites Raymond Williams. Also, she mentions other important authors such as Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. The author affirms that the Phenomenology perspective and its idea of sensory perception of knowledge help her to study of disability. Moreover, Ellcessor integrates feminist theories regarding social constructionism and the non-normative embodiment. This combination of theories is crucial to understanding access through a lens of experience as body, material technology and cultural ideology in a particular situated context. Additionally, Ellcessor claims that defining experience binds all pieces of her ‘access kit’ together, because it is through lived experiences that concepts of regulation, use, form and content are articulated to one another. To summarise, throughout Restricted Access, the author argues that access is not a simple phenomenon but a conjoining of elements that produces varied relationships to media, to other people and to society at large. Furthermore, by the end of the book, Ellcessor exposes the importance of the participatory culture concept as it offers an attractive vision of a digitally enabled culture, in which increased access to media production, political participation and social collaboration produces fairer and more egalitarian forms of culture (197). However, participation is not automatically accessible simply because it is available; developing collaborative means of cultural and political interaction requires creating forms of cultural accessibility that value differences in experience and standpoints and not only tolerate but welcome difference.