Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Thursday 13 April 2023 16.30 - 18.30
E-8 LAB12 Political Ideals, Legal Practices and Conflicting Rationales: how Disabled People Navigated Social Policies
B23
Networks: Labour , Social Inequality Chair: Gareth Millward
Organizer: Nathanje Dijkstra Discussant: Gareth Millward
Nathanje Dijkstra : Lacking Bodies and Social Barriers. (In)capacity to Work enacted by Disabled Workers in the Context of the Dutch Industrial Injuries Insurance Act, 1901-1967
This paper analyzes the ways in which disabled workers described their own incapacity to work and navigated examination practices that came with the first industrial injuries insurance act in the Netherlands (1901-1967). The history of social security legislation, has often been written with the idea that incapacity to work is ... (Show more)
This paper analyzes the ways in which disabled workers described their own incapacity to work and navigated examination practices that came with the first industrial injuries insurance act in the Netherlands (1901-1967). The history of social security legislation, has often been written with the idea that incapacity to work is the inherent result of a lacking body. Disability scholarship, however, considers incapacity to work the result of social barriers and shifting perception of productivity instead. (Rose, 2017). Based on statements of disabled workers in the higher appeal against the outcome of their claim assessment, this paper argues that, for workers the connection between incapacity to work and lacking bodies was not misguided but intersected with their experiences with excluding barriers, for which they together demanded acknowledgement and compensation. The workers’ appeals offer insights into a quest, shared by all parties involved, for the true properties of incapacity to work which was grounded in a variety of rationales. Analyzing two of these rationales, i.e. (reclaimed) expertise and workplace discrimination, the paper aims to show that incapacity to work was a concurrence of legal procedures and painful bodies, of frustrating examinations and misapprehension, as well as of fluctuations in energy and workload. This provides for an understanding of incapacity to work not as the outcome of a power struggle between (repressed, powerless) workers and (repressing, powerful) agents in service of the state, but as a moving target made in context-specific interactions in which workers were actively participating. (Show less)

Carlos Martins : Bottom-up Activism at the Dawn of Democracy: the Case of the Portuguese Disabled Colonial War Veterans in 1974-1975
Wounded in far-away African territories during the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974), disabled war veterans could have expected support of the dictatorial state, but received little more than propaganda actions and charity. With the arrival of

democracy in Portugal, these men, and their families, hoped to see a change in their situation ... (Show more)
Wounded in far-away African territories during the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974), disabled war veterans could have expected support of the dictatorial state, but received little more than propaganda actions and charity. With the arrival of

democracy in Portugal, these men, and their families, hoped to see a change in their situation of near abandonment. While the Carnation Revolution opened the doors for change in social policy and welfare arrangements, these men had to take their fate into their own hands, rallying together in a collective attempt to transform prevailing ideas about disability and claim their social rights.

This paper analyses the disabled war veterans’ movement sparked by the Carnation Revolution, as novel disability grass-roots activism, never seen before in the Portuguese context. United in their post-25 April 1974 association, these men worked together for two years in lobbying and setting pressure on the new political powers, which finally granted them social rights and changed the existing reintegration and rehabilitation policies. What is more, their activism would deeply influence the development of different disability policies in democratic Portugal. It is no exaggeration to say that their achievements during the period of 1974-1976 have made the Carnation Revolution a moment of change in social and welfare policy. This change was not inevitable nor guided through top-down decision-making, it was rather triggered by relentless activism and the aspiration of transformation. (Show less)

Stephanie van Dam : Petitioning the Metropole: Workers’ Injury Compensation in the British Empire, 1930-1945
Workplace injury was expensive and workers in the British Empire consistently challenged who was made to pay the bill. This paper highlights how injured workers from across the British Empire used petitions to protest the lack of support they received after a workplace injury. It asks how in the 1930s ... (Show more)
Workplace injury was expensive and workers in the British Empire consistently challenged who was made to pay the bill. This paper highlights how injured workers from across the British Empire used petitions to protest the lack of support they received after a workplace injury. It asks how in the 1930s and 1940s, petitioners made use of international labour policies on workplace injury to plead their case to the Colonial Office and demand fair financial support. Through a discussion of petitions asking for injury compensation, it becomes apparent that workers shaped how injury compensation was implemented within specific colonised countries. This paper argues that petitioners’ use of global social networks and international social policies not only affected injured workers’ individual circumstances, but also changed the way injury compensation was formulated and implemented in local contexts.
Where there is a tendency within historiography to focus on policy-makers and the able-bodied, this paper posits that petitions were used by those excluded from both these social groups to challenge their marginalised position and impact larger trends in policy-making. Thereby, this paper considers the larger conceptual problem of definitions of work and productivity from the angle of those who were not considered ‘able-bodied’ and fought against their exclusion from the labour force after injury. Moreover, the focus on petitioners highlights the overall aim of the panel; to centralise the lives and resistance of disabled workers from a historical perspective and thereby challenge the centralisation of policy-makers and top-down histories of social policies within current historiography. While injury compensation might have been formally drawn up within institutional contexts, the praxis of workplace injury compensation was very much influenced through workers’ petitions. (Show less)

Paul van Trigt : Transcending the Social Policy / Human Rights Divide. Self-advocates and the Making of Global Disability Policies, 1981-2011
Is it possible to unconditionally embrace and include people with disabilities on the one hand and to try to ‘fix’ or rehabilitate them on the other? This paper addresses how the United Nations and its specialized agencies dealt with these questions when they made disability policies and how this was ... (Show more)
Is it possible to unconditionally embrace and include people with disabilities on the one hand and to try to ‘fix’ or rehabilitate them on the other? This paper addresses how the United Nations and its specialized agencies dealt with these questions when they made disability policies and how this was determined by self-advocates. During 1981 disability became an established global policy category, but at that time nothing indicated that rehabilitation could generate tension for inclusive policies. This changed during the 1990s, when self-advocates from the Global North pushed a human rights perspective on disability and tried to erase rehabilitation as part of global disability policies. Despite their partial success, global policies aimed at the rehabilitation of disabled people did not disappear as became clear from the World Report on Disability (2011). How can the maintenance of rehabilitation as a core concept and practice for disability policies be explained and which actors did determine this?
The modern history of conceptualizing the inequality of people with disabilities is often presented in the literature as developing from a social policies approach to disability with rehabilitation at its core to more of a human rights and anti-discrimination one. However, from a historical perspective it is questionable if the dynamisms of disability movements worldwide, let alone the history of UN disability policies, can be described by this shift. That is why this paper will investigate how global disability policies were influenced by both social policies and human rights approaches to disability and show that these approaches often were combined in different constellations by different actors, including self-advocates. (Show less)



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