TANGATA GROUP, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the proposition that disability rights are human rights and founded by two School of Education graduates, has received a $200,000 grant through the United Kingdom’s Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning (DRILL) to further its work on deaf access to justice in Northern Ireland. The DRILL grant comes from the world’s first major research program led by people with disabilities and is financed with money from the United Kingdom’s National Lottery.

On May 1, 2018, Brent Elder spoke at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. about assessing students with disabilities around the world in ways that facilitate their membership in inclusive classrooms rather than justifying their placement in a segregated school.

I am not much of a writer but writing this piece was surprisingly a breeze. With World Down Syndrome Day approaching, I get the privilege to share our little world with you and give you a first hand understanding of what it means to include someone with an intellectual disability in the real world.

This expansion of teacher training on inclusive education and critical disability studies promoted sustained school- and community-based discussions on inclusive education and sensitisation on issues related to disability. These practices also led to the development of inclusion committees, co-teaching practices, and stimulated the partial dissolution of the physical boundaries and categorical distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘special’ schools. In conjunction, all of these factors ultimately led to an increase in the number of students with disabilities accessing any form of education for the first time. 

Associate Professor of Law Michael A. Schwartz has been awarded a grant of more than $200,000 to explore access to justice for deaf people, working in collaboration with the British Deaf Association, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Rowan University, NJ. This grant is part of approximately $1.5 million awarded to 10 research and pilot projects across the United Kingdom. The funding has been granted as part of the Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning (DRILL) program, led by disabled people and funded by the UK's Big Lottery Fund.

In 2017 I was arrested eight times fighting against the more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts that were proposed over and over again in the attempts to repeal Obamacare. Throughout all of my arrests I was not alone. I was always surrounded by 20 or more of my siblings in the grassroots Disability Rights group ADAPT.

In this project, we examined the development of a sustainable inclusive education system in western Kenya by combining community-based participatory research (CBPR) and decolonizing methodologies.

Dec. 3 marks the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. For me this day prompts some questions (and suggests some answers) on how organizations focused on advancing human rights globally, including AI, can and ought to be thinking about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). It should include, of course, consideration of diversity as to disability, whether physical, sensory, psycho-social or intellectual, and also diversity in respect of other characteristics.

People with disabilities rank high among those badly affected by conflict. For one thing, conflicts degrade whatever support systems are in existence. The lucky ones can flee – but many are forced by their circumstances to remain in the conflict zone after others have been evacuated, and are particularly vulnerable as a result.

Central African Republic: Floods; 1,750 people affected (August, 2017)
Sierra Leone: Mudslides; 500 dead; 810 people missing; 5,900 lost homes (August, 2017)
Nigeria: Floods; 43,000 people displaced (August, 2017)
Belize Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico: Tropical Cyclone Franklin (August, 2017)
Cameroon: Flash Floods; 12,890 people affected (August, 2017)
Tunisia: Forest Fires; 500 people displaced (August, 2017)

Walking into the frenetic international terminal at New York’s JFK Airport, I find a familiar face voraciously reading the day’s edition of the New York Times. Michael Schwartz and I hug with the embrace of brothers, and sign excitedly about our next Tangata Group adventure. Next stop: Belfast, Northern Ireland, the land of “a terrible beauty.”Professor Brent Elder and I recently conducted a series of interviews of Deaf people and their hearing allies in Northern Ireland, exploring the theme of access to justice under Article 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

Join Judy for a conversation with Actor and Advocate Andy Arias as we continue to celebrate LGBTQI Pride month.

Walking into the frenetic international terminal at New York’s JFK Airport, I find a familiar face voraciously reading the day’s edition of the New York Times. Michael Schwartz and I hug with the embrace of brothers, and sign excitedly about our next Tangata Group adventure. Next stop: Belfast, Northern Ireland, the land of “a terrible beauty.”

As a non-speaking, autistic, honor-society, college student, I am living the dream. To be certain, the sentence I just wrote must seem like an oxymoron to the average listener's ears. Yes, I am a non-speaking, non-writing, autistic, young man that attends a California State University and entered as a freshman. As far as I understand, I am one of a few such individuals attending a university across the nation---sort of like a unicorn!

Christopher was born in Bridgeport Connecticut where he was diagnosed and falsely diagnosed with an intellectual disability, he spent the first 10 years of his life in Foster Care. It was only after being adopted that Christopher began to be able to tap into his talents, as an artist, writer, on chair philosopher, and community organizer. Christopher lives and works in St. Louis Missouri.

Access to military justice is a broad concept, encompassing service members’ effective access to the systems, procedures, information, and locations used in the administration of military justice. Service members who have transgressed the laws of military justice are brought to the bar to answer for their offenses.

On March 22, 2017, the United States Supreme Court decided Endrew v. Douglas County School District, holding that in order to meet its substantive obligation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a school must provide a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to a child with a disability by offering an Individualized Education Program (IEP) “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.”

With “[m]ore than one billion [or 15% of] people in the world living with some form of disability,” as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), there is little doubt that they are especially affected by armed conflicts. Indeed, it is estimated that the prevalence of disability “is likely to increase to 18-20% in conflict-affected populations.”

And so it begins. With a barrage of controversial and polarizing Cabinet nominations, Trump further polarized the country and ignited national debates on everything from “pay to play” politics, to environmental pseudoscience, and the need for political experience in DC. During Senate confirmation hearings, educators and families of children with disabilities were shocked as they watch the confused, now confirmed, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos provide her testimony.