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The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) aims to improve national 'health and wealth' by providing infrastructural support to enable clinical research in National Health Service settings in England and Wales. Cognisant of the consequences of studies' failure to achieve required numbers of participants, it also actively campaigns to promote patient awareness of research, and willingness to participate in trials. In this paper, we analyse recent NIHR campaigns and policies designed to encourage patients to participate in clinical research to interrogate how they are implicated in the national bioeconomy. In doing so we expand the notion of 'clinical labour' to include the work of patient recruitment and highlight an emergent obligation on patients to contribute to research processes. Whereas once patient knowledge and experience may have been devalued, here we draw on the concept of 'assetisation' (Birch 2012) to explore the emergent relationship between healthcare system and patient as research participant. We consider how patients' contribution goes beyond the provision of standardised objects of valuation so that patients themselves may be perceived as assets to, not only recipients of, the national healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities guarantees equality of political rights, including the right to vote and stand for election. The affirmation of these rights, first guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, raises an important question given the long-standing association between political rights and beliefs concerning the abilities of citizens to reason and act independently: how and to what degree can people identified as having intellectual disabilities participate in a defining act of the democratic process? Focused specifically on the right to vote, this paper addresses the question by (1) introducing the debates that have surrounded the voting rights of this population; and (2) reporting on recent attempts in Kenya, and in England and Wales, to promote voting by people with intellectual disabilities. It concludes by considering the effectiveness of the different approaches these countries have adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]