Gabor Petri

This chapter analyses disability policy change and social movement history in Hungary from 1998 to 2022, with an aim to identify factors that shaped political opportunities. Data were collected through interviews with 15 experienced disability advocates, triangulated by policy documents, academic and grey literature, and media archives. Policy and social movement events are arranged into a movement timeline. This chapter found that the disability organisations’ access to policymaking improved significantly after the first disability rights act in 1998. However, despite a human rights framework and open government structures, movement campaigns in the 2000s did not lead to significant policy progress, primarily due to neoliberal politics. In the early 2010s, human rights-inspired policy progress was again offset by weakening democratic institutions, closing government structures, a shrinking advocacy space, the emptying-out of consultative platforms, and the fragmentation and frequent self-censorship of the disability movement. Movement actors said human rights-driven legal reforms and EU-funded flagship projects led to doubtful outcomes. By 2022, disability policymaking essentially stopped. This chapter closes by proposing three factors that shape disability rights in countries that go through de-democratisation.

This roundtable features five disability studies scholars and activists, Kamila Albin, Kateřina Kolářová, Gabor Petri, Magda(lena) Szarota, and Darja Zaviršek, from different Eastern and Central Eastern European countries: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia. It provides a window into regional understandings, challenges, and tensions vis-à-vis Russian imperialism and Western and Anglophone disability studies research which often focuses on Russia as representative of the region. The invited scholars approach Central and Eastern European disability studies as a part of global research on disability and pose questions about its importance both within the region and for the discipline as a whole. The topics they raise, among others, is the accountability of the academic discipline towards disability rights movements in Eastern Europe, war in Ukraine and its relation to disability rights, and democratic backsliding both in the region and globally. The titular “imagined futures” of disability studies in the region involve continuing investment in accessibility politics, collaboration with different stakeholders, including those outside academy and disability rights movement, engagement with the UN CRPD as well as rethinking relations with non-human actors and a move towards eco-crip relationality.

While studies consistently show that the popular media often provide medicalized images of disabled people as “other” or inferior, dynamic societal changes, such as the diffusion of human rights laws, increasing public awareness, and the mediatization of disability activism, also influence media representations. The present research aims to identify relevant discursive practices in Hungarian online news media, a non-Western European country with about 50 years of a state party system under communism, and offer insight into how progressive policy changes and mediatized activism shape media features on disability. To establish the dataset, the most visited and independent online news media portal in Hungary (24.hu) was searched for articles discussing disability between 2019 and 2022. The 481 relevant articles extracted were analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the help of MAXQDA 2020. The findings reveal a multiplicity of disability representations: medicalized and victimized images on the one hand, and reports of resilience and “heroism” on the other. Three distinct discursive practices are identified: (1) traditional/ableist representations, (2) alternative representations with ableist framing, and (3) agency and the co-creation of disability representations. Results suggest that even 30 years after the political changes, disabled people’s collective agency is marginal in Hungary, and that socio-legal changes and mediatized disability activism are yet to influence news media features.

While the representation of persons with disabilities in society is typically reflected in their appearance in the media, the media also reacts to reality, creating common language and perceptions. In the framework of the TARKI research entitled Changing and New Mechanisms of Exclusion of People with Disabilities, we examined articles published over a three-year period (1 May 2019 – 30 April 2022) on one of the largest Hungarian news portals, 24.hu. We sought to answer the question of to what extent and how online news media view persons with disabilities and how they are portrayed. The results show that there is a continuous dynamic of difference-similarity in disability representations. Many factors are at work to marginalize, exclude and make invisible people with disabilities (e.g., low incidence, medicalization, infantilization, belittling, taboo), but an alternative, resistant perspective also emerges, which presents a more diverse picture and in which the voices of those affected themselves are heard (blogs, websites, social media platforms, etc.).

Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research is an international peer-reviewed journal aiming to disseminate innovative, high quality, social research on disability, which enables critical reflection on the position of people with disabilities in different societal contexts.The journal’s defining characteristic is a focus on the relationship between people with disabilities and their environments. It is multi-disciplinary in scope, incorporating research from a variety of perspectives - such as sociological, historical, cultural studies, health and social policy - which share a commitment to recognising that disability is not a property of the individual person, but something shaped by social relations and structures.The journal was established by the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR), an association who actively facilitate the sharing and dissemination of social research on disability in the five Nordic countries.Read more about the journal here.

A fogyatékos emberek társadalmi mozgalma történetileg befolyásolta a liberális demokráciák fejlődését. A fogyatékossággal élő embereket érintő progresszív szakpolitikai változások a fogyatékosügyi mozgalom nyomására történtek. Ugyanakkor nem világos, hogy a civil érdekvédelmi térnek az erodálódó demokráciákban tapasztalható zsugorodása mennyiben érinti a fogyatékosügyi mozgalmat. Tanulmányunk a hazai fogyatékosügyi mozgalom 1998 óta eltelt időszakát vizsgálja a szakpolitikai bevonódás szintjeire és az érdekvédelmi lehetőségek változására fókuszálva. Tapasztalt mozgalmi szereplőkkel készült interjúkra (15) építve, és szakpolitikai dokumentumok vizsgálatával megállapítható, hogy a hazai fogyatékosügyi mozgalom bevonódása jelentősen romlott a 2010-es évek kezdete óta. A konzultációs platformok kiüresedtek, a kormányzati reakciótól tartva a szervezetek rendszeresen öncenzúrát gyakorolnak a kommunikációjukban, és kerülik a kormányzat kritikáját. A mozgalom széttöredezett. A fogyatékossággal élők igényeinek emberi jogi keretezése egyre kevésbé preferált kormányzati oldalról, az emberi jogokkal szembeni mozgalmi hozzáállás apatikus. Szűkült a média és a független emberi jogi intézmények elérése is.

Our study explores the housing situation of people with disabilities based on life course interviews. Although the focus is mainly on present housing issues and challenges, this is set in a longitudinal perspective highlighting the legacies from the socialist period onwards. The study distinguishes three social policy regimes: the state-socialist, the liberal and the illiberal ones, which, on the one hand had different ideas about disability, while on the other hand, applied different housing policies. Results suggest that the housing of people with disabilities depends on a number of aspects which cannot be controlled by our interviewees. Based on the interviews, we identified three key areas which play an especially important role in shaping the housing opportunities of people with disabilities. These are the resources and motivations of the family of origin; the geographic location of the residence; and institution managers, care-workers, roommates around them.