Social Justice

Page 1. Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Downloaded 2013-01-16T07:00:23Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Title Equality for all Families Author(s) De Londras, Fiona; Power, Conor; Reidy, Aisling; Walsh, Judy; Ward, Tanya Publication Date 2006-04 Publisher Irish Council for Civil Liberties Link to publisher's version Unavailable ...

Patient engagement is vital in multiple sclerosis (MS) in order to optimise outcomes for patients, society and healthcare systems. It is essential to involve all stakeholders in potential solutions, working in a multidisciplinary way to ensure that people with MS (PwMS) are included in shared decision-making and disease management. To start this process, a collaborative, open environment between PwMS and healthcare professionals (HCPs) is required so that similarities and disparities in the perception of key areas in patient care and unmet needs can be identified. With this patient-centred approach in mind, in 2016 the MS in the 21st Century Steering Group formed a unique collaboration to include PwMS in the Steering Group to provide a platform for the patient voice. The MS in the 21st Century initiative set out to foster engagement through a series of open-forum joint workshops. The aims of these workshops were: to identify similarities and disparities in the perception and priorit...

Background: The European Multiple Sclerosis Platform (EMSP) is an umbrella organization for national multiple sclerosis (MS) patients' associations in 34 European countries. Its focus is to improve the quality of life (QoL) of individuals with MS and inform society about the challenges of living with this chronic and debilitating disease. Summary: The EMSP, which is comprised of 39 MS societies across Europe, represents the interests of more than 600,000 individuals with MS and another 1.5 million persons affected by the disease, including family and caregivers. The organization works to achieve high quality, equitable treatment and support for persons with MS throughout Europe, as reflected in its main activities and projects. These include: the European Code of Good Practice in MS; a European MS register (EUReMS); a MS Barometer to assess QoL; the MS Nurse PROfessional curriculum to provide standards for MS nurse training; a photographic exhibition entitled Under Pressure; the...

In March this year, the European Multiple Sclerosis Platform (EMSP) launched its European Employment Pact for people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and other neurodegenerative conditions. A call to action for the Pact will follow in May. EMSP is inviting all relevant stakeholders, from businesses to decision-makers, to pledge support. People who are highly educated and skilled are edged out of the workplace by inadequate ‘return to work’ policies, lack of understanding and prejudice. EMSP considers this unacceptable.

This paper examines the nature of love labouring and explores how it can be distinguished from other forms of care work. It provides a three fold taxonomy for analysing other-centred work, distinguishing between work required to maintain primary care relations (love labour), secondary care relations (general care work) and tertiary care relations (solidarity work). A central theme of the paper is that primary care relations are not sustainable over time without love labour; that the realization of love, as opposed to the declaration of love, requires work. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and empirical sources, including a study of caring undertaken by the author, the paper argues that there is mutuality, commitment, trust and responsibility at the heart of love labouring that makes it distinct from general care work and solidarity work. It sets out reasons why it is not possible to commodify the feelings, intentions and commitments of love labourers to supply them on a paid basis.

If people are structurally excluded from democratic engagement with research practice, they are precluded from assessing its validity in an informed manner. They are effectively disenfranchised from controlling the generation and dissemination of knowledge about themselves and/or the institutions within which they live and work.

While economic capital is not synonymous with cultural, social or symbolic capital in either its constitutional or organisational form, it nevertheless remains the more flexible and convertible form of capital. The convertibility of economic capital has particular resonance within 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland. The State's reluctance to fully endorse an internal market between schools has resulted in middle class parents using their private wealth to create an educational market outside State control in the private sector to help secure the class futures of their children.

An indifference to the affective domain and an allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen are at the heart of formal education. The impact of Cartesian rationalism is intensifying with the glorification of performativity measured by league tables and rankings. The citizen carer and the care recipient citizen are only recognised in the educational arena when professionals are being trained to manage those in need of care. Education for informal care labour, solidarity work and love labour is generally not part of the formal educational trajectory. Because the scholarly understanding of work has been equated with economic self preservation and self-actualisation through interaction with nature, education is seen as preparation for this type of work. Education is indifferent to other-centred work arising from our interdependencies and dependencies as affective, relational beings. In particular it has ignored the centrality of nurturing for the preservation and self-actualisation of the human species. In this article the authors argue that sociologists need to engage with the extensive feminist scholarship on care if they are to challenge the deeply care-less view of the citizen that is implicitly accepted in new and older forms of liberal thinking. The rational economic actor model of the citizen is contrasted with the care-full view of the citizen and the implications of both for education are explored.

This paper is an account of how higher education can become a site of resistance in the pursuit of equality while also identifying the dangers and limitations involved in this process. The development of a new intellectual perspective, namely Equality Studies, is examined and its potential for the understanding of egalitarian practice is explored. The paper examines the reasons why sociology, in particular critical and neo-Marxist sociology, became inadequate as a way of understanding inequality and exploring egalitarian goals. It explores the limitations of the work of equality empiricists which has failed to move outside the liberal paradigm, and of critical theory and neo-Marxism which has not gone beyond critique to identify mechanisms and institutions to develop a new egalitarian order. Prom the author's perspective, the seeming inability of sociology to marry empirical and normative discourses was a key factor in contributing to the development of Equality Studies. The latter part of the paper outlines some of the central issues in Equality Studies and the positive influences on its development, both nationally and internationally. It argues for a new and more politically involved role for radical academics while recognising the very real constraints within which they now work.

Human beings are not just economic actors, devoid of relationality; rather, they are interdependent and dependent with a deep capacity for moral feeling and attaching. The presumption that people are mere units of labour, movable from one country to another as production requires, is therefore an institutionalised form of affective injustice. As love, care and solidarity involve work, affective inequalities also occur when the burdens and benefits of these forms of work are unequally distributed. Affective inequality is an acutely gendered problem given the moral imperative on women to care, and an acute problem for all of humanity given that vulnerability and inter/dependency is endemic to the human condition.

No one discipline has a monopoly on the truth, especially in the analysis of a complex subject such as equality. If we are to deepen our understanding of inequality in education, we must open a dialogue with other disciplines, most especially with egalitarian theory. Bearing in mind the limitations of writing in a majority language tradition, the article explores the potential for creating a dialogue about equality between sociologists and critical and feminist egalitarian theorists. What sociologists can gain from egalitarian theory is a deepening of their understanding of the interface between the ethical and the empirical, of the interrelationship between fact and value in social life. In addition, egalitarian theory has the capacity to broaden our understanding of inequality in education beyond the distributive view of social justice that has dominated thinking in education to date. Drawing on the work of egalitarian theorists the article outlines four particular interpretations of equality that have relevance for researchers in education. [1]