Equity Studies

Although peer sexual health education is a common form of sexual health promotion for youth, systematic reviews of these programs are relatively rare. In this study we interviewed youth peer educators to inquire about their experience of program evaluation and their perception of what is needed to develop effective evaluation practices. Data were collected from eighteen participants in semi-structured qualitative interviews of youth (aged 16-28 years) sexual health peer educators in Ontario, Canada. Community-based research principles were employed throughout the project with youth involved in all stages of the research. Analysis of the data revealed four key themes relating to youth sexual health peer education evaluation: i) varied program goals; ii) benefits to peer educators; iii) diverse evaluation methods; and iv) challenges in conducting evaluation. We discuss the relevance of our findings for evaluation practices of peer sexual health education programs.

We present a framework for conceptualizing gender equity, designed around four equity components: Access, Inclusion, Climate, and Empowerment (AICE). Our examination of these components in the current market schooling climate, with particular reference to the situation in Ontario, identifies some significant equity costs of market-driven education, including invisibility of systemic discrimination, co-option of gender equity initiatives to serve market objectives, failure to consider diversity and relations of power in educational practices, increased risks of sexual harassment, and increased barriers to social change. AICE equips educators with an analytical tool to conceptualize gender equity in a market-driven schooling climate. Les auteures proposent de conceptualiser le traitement équitable des sexes à l'aide d'un schéma formé de quatre éléments : accès, inclusion, climat et habilitation. L'analyse de ces éléments dans le contexte scolaire actuel, en particulier en Ontario, dévoile d'importants coûts inhérents à l'enseignement axé sur le marché, dont l'invisibililité de la discrimination systémique, l'assimilation aux objectifs du marché des initiatives en matière d'équité entre les sexes, l'occultation de la diversité et des relations de pouvoir dans les pratiques pédagogiques, les risques accrus de harcèlement sexuel et la multiplication des obstacles au changement social. Le schéma donne aux enseignants un outil analytique leur permettant de conceptualiser le traitement équitable des sexes dans un contexte éducatif axé sur le marché.

In December of 2007, the Globe and Mail, one of Canada's national newspapers, published a series of articles written by columnist Ian Brown. In the three part-series entitled, "The Boy in the Moon," Brown narrates his life with his cognitively disabled son. This paper explores Brown's articles in relation to Judith Butler's (2004) "Violence, Mourning, Politics," and conducts an analysis of how cognitive disability is being enacted as "not quite a life" (34). This paper demonstrates how Brown's articles tell the story of cognitive disability as a state of brokenness, some-thing that requires fixing. Significantly, when disability defies and/or resists fixing, it is discursively reframed as a tragic loss. By attending to the making of disability in Brown's articles, this paper is more broadly interested in how disabled and nondisabled bodies ('we') are being formed in and through social spaces. "Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?" -Judith Butler Precarious Life: The powers of mourning and violence, 20 11/12/13 Disability, Non-disability and the Politics of Mourning: Re-conceiving the 'we' | McGuire | Disability Studies Quarterly dsq-sds.org/article/view/1282/1309 2/16

Autism is widely understood in contemporary times as nothing more than a biomedical disorder in need of treatment and/or cure. War on Autism disrupts this singularity by examining autism as a historically specific and power-laden cultural phenomenon that has much to teach about the social organization of a neoliberal western modernity. Bringing together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, queer and critical race theory, and cultural studies, the book analyzes the social significance and productive effects of contemporary discourses of autism as these are produced and circulated in the field of autism advocacy. Anne McGuire discusses how in the field of autism advocacy, autism often appears as an abbreviation, its multiple meanings distilled to various “red flag” warnings in awareness campaigns, bulleted biomedical ”facts” in information pamphlets, or worrisome statistics in policy reports. She analyzes the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and traces their continuities to reveal an underlying, powerful, and ubiquitous logic of violence that casts autism as a pathological threat that advocacy must work to eliminate. Such logic, McGuire contends, functions to delimit the role of the “good” autism advocate to one who is positioned “against” autism. - See more at: https://www.press.umich.edu/7784427/war_on_autism#sthash.3Va0kRSn.dpuf

The article examines the cultural effects of the spectrum as an increasingly popular way of classifying behavioural, mental, and emotional states. The past decades have witnessed shifts in the conceptualization of psychiatric diagnostic criteria. Disorders that were once understood as singular pathologies are increasingly re-configured as spectral pathological ranges. This rise of spectral thinking is evident in the most recent revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-5 marks the beginning of psychiatry’s migration away from strict categorical approaches to diagnosis, where disorder is either present or absent, and toward dimensional approaches, where disorder is measured by degree. These shifts have generated debate within the field of psychiatry (and beyond), centering on the apparent disappearance of “normal.” Attending to the DSM-5’s new severity scales, the article argues that conceptions of mental normalcy are not so much disappearing, as they are being reconfigured and put to use in new ways. The proposition is that spectral adjustments to psychiatric diagnostic categories represent a neoliberal deregulation of disorder. That is to say, the blurring of categorical boundaries separating normalcy and disorder is working to stimulate the market, while also grounding the emergence of novel subjectivities and forms of normative surveillance and control.