Inclusion (disability rights)
In progress
- For the concept of inclusion in organizational culture, see the article Inclusion (value and practice).
Inclusion is a term used by activist people with disabilities and other disability rights advocates for the idea that human beings should freely, openly and happily accommodate any other human being that happens to be differently-abled without question or qualification of any kind. The concept goes beyond mainstreaming, which is the process of trying to ensure that a person with physical and/or mental divergences from the mainstream is put alongside those without such differences, in hopes that each will adapt to and learn about the other.
Although the concept of inclusion began as a policy to ensure that all children regardless of ability are put into classrooms as everyday students and become part of their school community as such, inclusion today is more widely thought of as a practice of ensuring that people of differing abilities - particularly different physical abilities - feel they belong, are engaged, and connected through their work to the goals and objectives of the whole wider society. For example, in the United Kingdom, Canada and much of Western Europe (but not, it should be noted, nearly so much in the United States), there exists a relative (and the term 'relative' should be stressed) plethora of actors and actresses with physical disabilities that have roles on-screen in everyday television, theater and film. In Canada it is not unusual, for example, for a disabled person or group of people to need a ramp in a public place and have the government or the business in question install that ramp quite quickly -- within days, a week, or a month. The idea of inclusion ensures that people with disabilities are in these ways regarded as full and equal members of society from the outset, and that only proof to the contrary would impact the perception of the regularly-abled in society or among those officials that make policy.
This attitude is quite divergent from the prevailing attitude in most countries, which tends to be the case regardless of industrialization or lack thereof; e.g., in the United States there remains more in common attitudinally, when it comes to inclusion, with the former. The reasons for the latter phenomenon are not entirely clear: some say that the architecture of the United States' most prominent cities, particularly New York City, is older, and thus that structural adjustment for people with disabilities costs more and is impractical, leading indirectly to a measure of hostility towards people with disabilities feeling entitled to receive such adjustments unquestionably. Others blame the attitude of social darwinism more generally, accusing it of corrupting the attitude of "normal" able-bodied people towards those with disabilities in the United States in essentially all areas, to the point that it prevents that country's culture from readily accepting disabled people as totally full and equal members of society in aspects and venues that are not directly legality or law-related, such as theater, film, dance, and sexuality.
Inclusion's opposite tends to be an attitude or undercurrent of pity and/or sorrow among the regularly-abled population towards those with disabilities, and, among the medical community, an attitude of over-medicalization — focusing constantly on the physical and/or mental therapies, medications, surgeries and assistive devices that might help to "normalize" the differently-abled as much as possible to their surrounding environment, thus making such a person's life in the "normal world" that much more bearable. The attitude of inclusion, which has a lot in common with the social model of disability, alleges that this entire approach is wrong and that those who are physically and/or mentally differently-abled are automatically put on a much more effective and fulfilling road to full participation in society if they are, instead, looked at by society from the outset as totally "normal" people who just happen to have these "extra differences."
In the United States, a nascent movement toward societal inclusion of this type is slowly taking shape in New York City. Arts events such as the DisThis! Film Series, dance performance by Lisa Bufano through Heidi Latsky, Theater By The Blind, Visible Theater and Nicu's Spoon are part of this emerging phenomenon, helped along to a large degree by Lawrence Carter-Long, a nationally-acknowledged U.S. advocate and orator in the field with spastic diplegia.
References
- Gasorek, Dory. 1998. “Inclusion at Dun & Bradstreet: Building a High-Performing Company.” The Diversity Factor 8/4 (Summer) 2529.
- Hyter, Michael C. and Turnock, Judith L. 2006. The Power of Inclusion: Unlock the Potential And Productivity of Your Workforce. John Wiley & Sons.
- Miller, Frederick A. and Katz, Judith H. 2002. The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Roberson, Quinetta M. 2006. “Disentangling the Meanings of Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations.” Group & Organization Management 31/2:212-236.