Sue Porter

The shifting sands of support planning

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the current issues about support planning within personal budgets (PBs) for disabled and older people.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on data from a round of professional workshops in five local authorities, which represented the first stage of a research study about support planning. Focus group discussions were held with participants from voluntary sector organisations (VSOs), as well as social services participants, and the paper is based on a thematic analysis of those discussions.Findings – While there was considerable agreement about the desired outcomes for personal budget users, and the ingredients of good support planning, some major concerns were voiced about current constraints. Budgetary cuts were felt to impinge negatively on support planning, and conflicts were identified for social services between the facilitation of PB users’ choices, and the need to keep budgets limited. Support planning was often being...

Understanding disabling barriers: a fruitful partnership between Disability Studies and social practices?

Abstract Disabled people are regularly denied their human rights, since policies and laws are hard to translate literally into practice. This article aims to make connections between social practice theories and Disability Studies, in order to understand the problems faced by disabled people, using different methods to look in detail at how practices are shaped and how disabled people get excluded. Disabled people are active agents in making change, both informally on an everyday basis and through formal actions. Thus we also suggest that the insights of disabled people could bring a fresh perspective to social practice theories, by troubling the taken-for-granted in our everyday lives.

Environmental hazard and disabled people: from vulnerable to expert to interconnected

Why are disabled people disproportionately affected by the impacts of environmental hazard, and is it really only their relative poverty that makes them so vulnerable? What might disabled people contribute from their experience of negotiating barriers to designing responses to the challenges of environmental hazard? Can the lived experience of inter-dependency, as opposed to individual independence, contribute to the radical rethinking of our relationships with the environment, other sentient beings and each other? Drawing on a short scoping study, this article reviews the multiple causes of disabled people’s vulnerability, and goes on to ask whether the experience disabled people enables them to become valued contributors, rather than just members of a vulnerable group. We also explore possible reasons for the lack of inclusion and diversity within the environmental movement, and suggest that the disability and environmental movements might make a more common cause.

Everyday Fragments on the Ceiling of Room 407 An Open Narrative Inquiry Space

Jane Speedy was leading the community of scholars in the “open space” session for March 2014 in Room 407. The Narrative Inquiry Centre held an “open space” session every month on the fourth floor of the Graduate School of Education. In “open space” sessions, one scholar led with exemplars of work that was troubling them/that they were troubling, after which others contributed their thoughts/comments and writing. Jane Speedy’s recent stroke had reduced/distilled/extended her writing into fragments. Her colleagues followed/responded with fragments of their own and thus this text was collaboratively written, in real time, on March 3, 2014.

Introduction to ‘Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions’

Slippage between fact and fiction, a commonplace feature of arts-based inquiries, is exemplified in the use of science fiction in this chapter, which is presented ‘as if’ extracted from the field blog of the twenty-ninth century Zelotzvian archaeologist and historian of academic systems of thought, Gregorius Corbilsohn. Perhaps it was.

Introducing Collaborative Ways of Working

I’m looking forward to writing this overview with you. In the original book proposal I had somehow put my name down, just as a marker I think, as the writer of all the overview sections, but of course, when it comes to a section on collaborative and creative ways of working, what could be more absurd than a single author?

Bare Arsed Stories

As with any collective biography, this text draws upon the writing, speaking and remembering of my co-biographers, namely Ann Rippin, Jane Speedy, Marina Malthouse, Anne O’Connor, Peggy Styles and Louise Younie.