People with learning disabilities face numerous barriers accessing health and social care. Previous studies have identified that poor communication can be a significant barrier, but this has not been explored in depth. This article explores the perceptions and experiences of people with learning disabilities and their family carers regarding communication with health and social care professionals, in order to establish both the areas that they find problematic and also identify strategies that can lead to more effective communication. Five people with learning disabilities and their family carers participated in the study, sharing their experiences through the use of semi-structured and symbol exchange interviews, and pictures. Communication was an area of concern for all participants, affecting their access to health and social care. Participants reported instances of ineffective and disrespectful communication and identified a desire for professionals to use a variety of communication methods, such as gestures, touch, and images, rather than relying on verbal language alone and to treat people with learning disabilities with respect.

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At the start of Tommy Orange's There There, Cheyenne child Tony Loneman peers into his television screen and considers a playground taunt: "Why's your face look like that?" Confronted with his reflection, he discovers the "Drome"—the way fetal alcohol syndrome has contoured his body, "the way history lands on a face." The novel ends with another question from Tony: "Grandma, what are we?" With these pillared concerns—the "why" of nonnormative embodiment and the "what" of cultural identity—There There invites us to consider the ways that Indigeneity and disability are constitutive of one another. We argue that Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) explores how the disabled Native bodymind is always under the surveillance of the present colonial eye. We do so via close-readings of three of Tony's encounters in the novel: with himself, with an able-bodied, non-Native interlocutor who interrogates his cultural and bodymind alterity, and with his grandmother. Embodying the ancestral trauma renewed in these moments, Tony must not only live within a multi-generational temporality but must also (re)assemble his reality through constant encounters with non-Native interlocuters, moments that mimic and remind the reader of the original contact zones of American coloniality. In analyzing these moments, this article considers how disability and Indigeneity are, at once, in tension while also mutually constitutive of one another through three ongoing operations of the colonial project: the branding, transformation, and invasive reading of the bodymind. As settler colonialism continues to find its "specific, irreducible element" of territoriality not only on the geographical space of the Americas, but also on the individual bodymind, disability and Indigeneity, the corporeal and the ideological, the national and the personal, become metonymically connected and intimately imbricated.

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Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) is the journal of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). It is a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities, disability rights advocates, creative writers,

Over the past few months living and facing the COVID-19 pandemic, the fact that the virus and its spread are not democratic has already been proven: the most common profile among victims of the new disease are black, indigenous, and poor people. In addition, it is also racialized and people on the periphery have been experiencing the greatest economic and social impact of the pandemic. COVID-19, in this sense, seems to be consistent with other documented health crises, making its way along the wide avenues of inequality. In this article, we seek to describe how the paths of inequality traced by COVID-19 intersect with the paths of another epidemic, which is now almost invisible in the public eye: that of the Zika Virus. Based on field diaries from research carried out in Recife / PE between 2016 and 2020, we seek to show how families previously affected by Zika now face COVID-19, pointing to structural factors common to the two health crises that put the same people at greater risk of exposure.

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Through the case study of wheelchair user accessibility in public transportation in London, United Kingdom, this article aims to show how the field of disability studies can enrich other disciplines––in this particular case, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Firstly, this paper describes the manners in which wheelchair users struggle with various access barriers in transport, from broken technologies to tense social interactions. This is partnered with a discussion on the nature of infrastructures as highly paradoxical things that struggle with temporality and scale. Secondly, this article describes the inclusion mechanisms developed by wheelchair-using passengers to combat this neoliberal-able infrastructure, showing how they are extremely active users of this network. This is used to illustrate how disability studies throws into question long-standing definitions in the field of STS, namely that of infrastructures being "invisible". This article argues that "invisibility" is a category of privilege for infrastructures, and shows how other disciplines can be enriched through dialogue with the field of disability studies.

This article will trace the key legislative interventions in the lives of persons with disabilities in Ireland. It will explore the growth of a vast network of institutions and the subsequent legislative powers which were introduced to allow for the removal of persons deemed "dangerous" or "mad" from society. In particular, it will consider the powers afforded to police officers during both the age of institutionalisation and the age of deinstitutionalisation in the late twentieth century. It will be argued that the police have played a historically important role in the control and confinement of deviant persons, yet little is known about the extent to which they were involved in the removal of individuals to institutions such as asylums and workhouses. The police continue to play an integral role in the contemporary mental health system and this article will question whether this is appropriate especially in light of Ireland's ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.