May 16, 2024
What concerns me here is that disability identity is a given, and that impairment automatically defines personal identity. Instead, I would argue that disability politics offers individuals new options for thinking about both their impairment and their social position.
Tom Shakespeare
The Council of Ministers of 15 April 2024 definitively approved the implementing decree of the enabling law on disability (law 227/2021): an important innovation, which leads to reflections on the rights of people with disabilities and, more in general, with respect to the idea of disability.
Reflections that have always been at the center of Erickson International Conference “I am an adult”which reaches its fourth edition in 2024: Friday 17 and Saturday 18 May, in Trento and online on the Zoom platform, two days to discuss and reflect on good practices at a national and international level, reflect on the current situation and propose innovative solutions for the future, with particular attention to delicate issues such as the right to choose and family and professional relationships with a an enabling and not exclusively welfare perspectivein line with the principles of the UN Convention.
“I’m an adult!” it is a request that people with disabilities address to their families, to professionals and more generally to the community, so that their needs, preferences and values are considered, with concrete effects on the setting of interventions and on the quality of their lives. Stop considering them eternal “boys”, but rather people with rights and dutiescan in fact help to better consider their needs and expectations and strengthen their right to independently choose their future: this has always been the common thread that guides the Erickson conference.
Among the themes at the center of this fourth edition: the life project, from an institutional/regulatory and methodological point of view, a tool now considered fundamental and necessary for people with disabilities; the rights of people with disabilities, in light of the legislative reform currently underway; there non-discrimination, one of the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, recognized and clearly described, but still far from full application.
Among the international guests, Tom Shakespeare – one of the main protagonists of the international scientific debate on disability, former professor at the Universities of Sunderland, Leeds and Newcastle, he worked on behalf of the WHO on the creation of the World Report on Disability (2011) – he is the author of Disability and society. Rights, false myths, social perceptions, republished for the occasion by Il Margine.
The essay provides a broad and up-to-date overview of disability studies presenting Shakespeare’s controversial and debated position: a “relational” vision of disability, understood as the result of the interaction between individual factors and contextualwhich include impairment, personality, individual attitudes, environment, politics and culture. Disability and society it is therefore a precious tool for all those who wonder about the condition of disabled people in today’s society, without fear of asking themselves even the most uncomfortable questions regarding the crucial moments of human existence.
The Conference is the result of the work of a group of experts coordinated by Erickson Research & Development.
Here is the complete program:
