Inclusion (disability rights)
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- 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. Inclusion goes beyond mainstreaming, 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 way to ensure that children with disabilities are given a chance to be educated within the school they are "meant to" attend as everyday members of society, inclusion today is more widely thought of as a much more general and all-encompassing 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 to witness 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. 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 (see Medical model of disability) — 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."
As a rule, the prevailing pity-based attitude tends to be the case regardless of a country's industrialization or lack thereof; e.g., in the United States there remains more in common attitudinally with pity than with inclusion. The exact reasons for this phenomenon apparently existing somewhat more in the United States than in other similar countries, 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 an unusually high measure of hostility towards people with disabilities lest they end up feeling entitled to receive such adjustments unquestionably. Others tend to blame the attitude of Social Darwinism more generally, accusing it of corrupting the attitude of "normal" able-bodied people in the United States towards those with disabilities in essentially all areas — often 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, e.g. theater, film, dance, and sexuality.
In the United States, a nascent movement toward inclusion is slowly taking shape in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Arts events such as the DisThis! Film Series, AXIS Dance Company, 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.
