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This open access book brings together oral histories that record the experiences of individuals with intellectual disabilities in Shanghai as they participate in their careers. Employees with intellectual disabilities describe their experiences seeking, attaining, and maintaining employment. Their managers, colleagues, and family members also provide keen insight into the challenges and opportunities these individuals have encountered in the process of securing employment. An appendix provides a compilation of employment policies related to people with intellectual disabilities, particularly with respect to Shanghai.

This open access book is unique in presenting the first oral history of individuals with an intellectual disability and their families in China. In this summary volume and the two accompanying volumes that follow, individuals with an intellectual disability tell their life stories, while their family members, teachers, classmates, and co-workers describe their professional, academic, and family relationships. Besides interview transcripts, each volume provides observations and records in real time the daily experiences of people with an intellectual disability. Drawing on the methodologies of sociology and oral history, the summary volume provides an unprecedented account of how people with intellectual disabilities in China understand themselves while also examining pertinent issues of public policy and civil society that have ramifications beyond the field of disability itself.

Deborah Luise Lutz explores support work relationships, the relationships between people with intellectual disabilities in receipt of a personal budget and their support workers. Through the methodology of Institutional Ethnography, she specifically investigates how personal budget policies that organize support work in Germany and Australia influence support work relationships. She found that the policies of personal budgets are connected to people's views and expectations about the support work relationship and the support work context that influence the relationship. The author argues that disability research, policy and practice need to be cognisant of this interconnection to improve the quality of support work relationships.

What happens when a group traditionally defined as lacking the necessary capacities of citizenship is targeted by government programs that have made ‘citizenship inclusion'their main goal? Combining theoretical perspectives of political philosophy, social theory, and disability studies, this book untangles the current state of Western intellectual disability politics following the replacement of state institutionalisation by independent and supported living, individual rights, and self-determination. Taking its cue from Foucault's conception of ‘biopolitics', denoting the government of the individuals and the totality of the population, its overarching argument is that the ambiguous positioning of people with intellectual disabilities with respect to the ideals of citizenship results in a regime of government that simultaneously includes and excludes people of this group. On the one hand, its members are projected to become ideal-citizens via the cultivation of citizenship capacities. On the other, the right to live independently and by their own choices is curtailed as soon as they are seen as failing with respect to the ideals of reason and rationality. Therefore, coercion, restraints, and paternalism, which were all supposed to end with deinstitutionalisation, are still ingrained in services targeting the group. In equal parts a theoretical work, advancing debates of critical disability theory, social theory, and post-structural philosophy, as well as an empirical engagement with the history of intellectual disability politics and the ways in which present day politics target the group, this book will be of interest to all students and scholars of disability studies, disability politics, and political theory.