Project Leader and Manager: Jean-Philippe LaMarche

Description

The disability issue frequently recurs in many public policy topics: employment, training & skill enhancement, housing, means, citizenship, ethics, access-ability, etc.

Being impaired does not only make you part of a particular social group, being weakened keeps you apart from other societal functions.

New forms of socialization are emerging that are shaped by social disaffiliation, globalization, the cult of performance, assertiveness and its fulfillment, the rise of individualism … In such an environment, it is easy  –following what we call an « accident of life » — to soon belong to the panel of « downgraded » persons with a difference, subject to gradual withdrawal from social life.

A few institutional deadlocks -and their partitioning according to jurisdictions- move away a person from humanist values that are particularly needed to approach this multiple and complex dimension: disability as well physical, mental and psychological, as social and societal.

The institutional apparatus remodels, driven by texts that give legitimacy, means and approaches. But what about the practices, usages, everyday realities?

From that perspective, how is the disability panorama developing? Who are the contributors of innovation and evolution?

Our project group is enrolling us in this topicality and establishing us an observatory of emerging movements that empower and recognize plural knowledge of people in singular situation.

It mobilizes experts whose diversity makes reference at the level of new uses in a mutant world. The CMA becoming the crucible and the referent of those who advocate the human values in a society that moves from a traditional model of socialization through transmission to socialization through experience.

A group of intelligence and reflection where other associations will feed to be enabled to initiate a process that should benefit everyone currently left aside.