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Disability support systems have undergone significant changes in contexts of rapid neoliberalisation. Services that were once provided or commissioned by the state are now increasingly delivered on an individual basis, through cash budgets and other forms of ‘individualised funding’ (IF). These changes have been driven by both state and non-state advocates of a greater role for markets in the provisioning of welfare, as well as significant sections of the disability rights movement. While these are widely recognised as part of a global process of market-oriented state restructuring, a lacuna exists in the critical literature in regard to the international diffusion of IF models. This study addresses this gap though a cross-national investigation of IF as an object of neoliberal policy mobility. The study traces the movement and mutation of IF in and between England, Scotland and Australia, and explains how and why it has proliferated in the ways that it has. I highlight IF’s inherent spatial, relational and political character, and the ways it has moved and mutated between countries, deploying a policy mobilities approach as a theoretical point of departure. These themes are explored empirically through a methodology of following the policy through global networks and identifying the key players involved in its dissemination. To follow the policy, I developed a multi-site extended case study design, comprising three key sites of policy adaptation: England, Scotland and Australia. Through analysis of documentary materials and 30 semi-structured interviews with civil society actors, disability movement actors and policy makers, the thesis maps the spread of IF models through transnational networks. It highlights the ways in which networks actors themselves are embedded within, and conditioned by, global and national webs of norms, ideologies and structural constraints.The thesis finds that the variety of actors involved in the transnational diffusion of market-based m

© 2018 Australian Social Policy Association Australian disability policy has undergone considerable reform since the early 2000s. While recent research and scholarship has largely focused on the new National Disability Insurance Scheme, there is a dearth of research that examines the impact of reform to the Disability Support Pension, and even less so the effects on Indigenous Australians living with disability. This is surprising as a higher proportion of Indigenous Australians live with disability than the non-Indigenous population. This article pays particular attention to the experiences of Aboriginal Australians who have acquired a disability after extensive years of working (25–40 years), yet are still of workforce age (less than 65 years of age). Because of tightened eligibility criteria for the Disability Support Pension, people in this group are placed onto the lower paid Newstart Allowance (general unemployment benefit). The article illustrates the high levels of poverty that Aboriginal Australians with disabilities experience daily, and the ongoing costs they incur in managing Newstart conditionality to maintain continued access to the general unemployment benefit.

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Gareth M. Thomas and Dikaios Sakellariou; individual chapters, the contributors. This chapter draws upon the life narrative of Helen, an elderly disability feminist activist, to traverse normative notions of the good life that have been central to Western political liberalism and its ableist ideal of human flourishing. Helen’s life narrative reveals the differing modalities of reflexive experimentation that become a vital strategy to reimage and practice notions of the good life. Helen’s embodied practices of everyday life are illustrative of the diffuse ways in which disability enables the reimaging of inclusive forms of liberal citizenship.

An accepted assumption that permeates much of contemporary Western culture and especially research contexts is the need to solve, fix and/or surmount perceived ‘problems’. Generally speaking, the moral imperative that informs this attitude is that the resulting resolutions will improve people’s lives. In turn and unfortunately, a pragmatism of haste can often accompany this goal. Perhaps nowhere else is this paradigm clearer than in the realm of medical care; medical institutions making it their raison d'être to cure illness and overcome disease as quickly and efficiently as possible. The palliative setting poses a unique conundrum for this way of thinking insofar as the fate awaiting terminal patients is inevitable death: something that cannot be remedied or negotiated. Despite this, the ‘solutions-based’ logic outlined above tends to prevail in these spaces, often tied up in models of care that routinely assume what patients (and, indeed, carers) need, how their identities are forged and lived, what motivates them to act in particular ways and, importantly, who gives what to whom. Implicitly, this involves certain assumptions regarding the power relations animating interactions between patients and carers. This thesis will question the value of problem-solving ‘efficiencies’. It does so by examining power relations in end-of-life settings, contemplating alternative perspectives to traditional dichotomies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practice vis-à-vis carer and patient relations. This involves unsettling the presumption that there is only one truth – not only for end-of-life care but also for the project of social research itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s renderings of power, discourse and knowledge, I examine how patient or volunteer experiences can be read in myriad ways, with acts of care being written through time and across lives, often yielding surprising implications.I use a variety of sociological, anthropological and political texts, together with qualitative

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. This article maps the impact of neoliberal restructuring of disability services and income support measures on Aboriginal people with disabilities living in rural areas of the West Kimberley in Australia. The international literature has extensively documented disability and Indigenous neoliberal welfare retraction measures, though as discrete areas of research. We aim to emplace the intersectional experience of such reforms by exposing their unique and qualitatively different dynamics and processes of disablement and Indigenous dispossession in the lived experiences of Aboriginal Australians with disabilities in rural Australia. Interviews conducted with Aboriginal people with disabilities living in the West Kimberley revealed the impact of neoliberal policies of retracting disability supports and rationalising services. The effects were felt in terms of people’s mobility, autonomy and economic security, with chronic, and at times crisis, levels of socio-economic insecurity experienced. Neoliberal spatial structures have led to further peripheralisation of rural and remote populations and a resulting increase in levels of inequality, deprivation and marginalisation for Aboriginal Australians with disabilities, who endure and survive by navigating these disabling spaces.

There is growing concern surrounding the retraction of disability social provisioning measures across the western world, with state fiscal policy trends foregrounding austerity as a central principle of welfare provisioning. This is occurring within many of the nation-states that have ratified and legislated rights enshrined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This article undertakes a critical analysis of disability income retraction in Australia since the early 2000s and examines these changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with disability by focusing on Article 20 of the CRPD, the right to personal mobility, a core right for people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. Beyond economic inequality, the article illustrates that the various administrative processes attached to welfare retraction have implications for the realisation of mobility practices that are critical for individual cultural identity and wellbeing. Disability austerity has resulted in a new form of Indigenous containment, fixing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disabilities in a cyclical motion of poverty management.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis article draws on grounded qualitative research with rural Tamil women who acquired a disability during the civil war in Sri Lanka and conceptualizes an intersectionality-peace framework. Three main themes were developed from the interviews: narratives of conflict, survival outcomes of social assistance and mobilization of cross-ethnic relationships. With the support of a local women’s disability advocacy organization, Tamil women with disabilities were enabled to overcome social stigma and claim a positive identity as women with disabilities. The organization’s focus on realizing disability rights created new opportunities for these highly marginalized rural women. The women were also supported to form cross-ethnic relationships with women who similarly faced multiple oppressions. These relationships transformed the women into ‘agents of peace’, using their newfound disability identity to foster cross-ethnic dialogue and create safe spaces in the post-conflict context.

© 2017 Australian Association of Social Workers This article presents the findings from a small qualitative study of Refugee Settlement Service (RSS) workers under Australia’s Humanitarian Settlement Services and Settlement Grants Program. Managers and front-line workers from five Refugee Settlement Services in rural and urban New South Wales were interviewed to examine the impact of new Government funding structures and contracts on the delivery of services and supports to newly arrived refugees. The comparative findings show that the Government’s contractual arrangements impact Refugee Settlement Services in different ways; ultimately prioritising market-like structures and undermining their core service roles. We argue that improving the relationship between Government and Refugee Settlement Services is critical to successful refugee settlement.IMPLICATIONSSuccessful refugee settlement requires greater flexibility and responsiveness in rural and urban Refugee Settlement Service (RSSs).RSSs require increased autonomy and control over funding to enable locally responsive service provision for newly arrived refugees.

© Australian Social Policy Association. A comprehensive national response to violence against women with disabilities is long overdue in Australia. Work to date suggests that the issue is endemic yet largely invisible. Responses at the national level are hampered by the lack of information regarding violence against women with disabilities due to under-reporting and inadequate capture of the prevalence of this violence. This article explores approaches to collecting data regarding violence against women with disabilities in Australia and adds to the limited body of knowledge about the prevalence of violence for these women through interrogation of available data. Further analysis of the 2012 Personal Safety Survey data indicates that among women with disabilities aged under 50, 62 per cent have experienced violence since the age of 15, and women with disabilities had experienced three times the rate of sexual violence in the past 12 months compared to those without disabilities. These findings still do not represent the full extent of violence against women with disabilities, since the Personal Safety Survey samples only women who reside in private dwellings and excludes those living in disability care settings. Insight is offered as to what is needed to comprehensively capture the required data and the implications for policy.

Australia has developed a National Disability Strategy and a National Plan of Action on Violence Against Women in response to its international human rights commitments. Neither the Strategy nor the Plan, however, appears to adequately address violence against women with disabilities. Violence disproportionately affects women with disabilities as they are uniquely vulnerable to forms of violence due to their specific living circumstances. By drawing upon feedback from the UN convention committees, this article looks at Australia’s progress in meeting its international human rights obligations — especially under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — and discusses the shortcomings in Australian domestic legislation and emerging policies in addressing issues of violence against women with disabilities.

© 2015. There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state's territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.

© 2015. Broad and inter-disciplinary inquiry into disability is at a nascent stage in Sri Lanka. This paper looks at the intersectionality of disability and gender in the specific contexts of ‘the rural’ and the armed conflict-affected areas of the country, particularly the interaction with the law. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted among rural women with disabilities in the North Central and Eastern provinces, including women who acquired disabilities resulting from the internal conflict. Legal literacy, administrative discretion in disability-related welfare programmes, and transitional justice and reconciliation emerged as the most prominent themes in the interviews. We analyse these issues using a rights framework in an attempt to highlight some of the vulnerabilities of women with disability in the rural and war-affected contexts. The paper also reflects on a few instances where those vulnerabilities have been overcome through collective action.

© 2015. This paper reports findings of a qualitative study conducted in collaboration with Aboriginal people with disabilities and their carers residing in the rural and remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, specifically the impact of chronic food insecurity on their daily lives. Nutritious food is important to maintaining health, particularly for Aboriginal people with disabilities who are at the greatest risk of a range of chronic health conditions, illnesses and secondary disability. In the remote areas of the West Kimberley, the high cost of living, including food expenses and the generally low incomes of residents mean that food insecurity is common. A large portion of the population living in remote and rural areas of the Kimberley is Aboriginal, and chronic illness and disability are twice as likely among this group. Lack of access to nutritious food has a cyclical interaction with disability, resulting in secondary impairments and ill health, which leads to greater economic exclusion and further food insecurity. Participants in this research consistently reported that they coped with food insecurity by fishing and crabbing on their traditional lands, “in country”. This link between land sovereignty, food sovereignty and food security for Aboriginal Australians has echoes with global food sovereignty movements.