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What is day-to-day life like for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities who live in group homes? How do they express their desires and wishes? How do care workers think about them and treat them? Do they have basic rights to activities most of us take for granted: activities like sociability, sexuality, and moral affirmation? Narrowed Lives is an illuminating portrait of what life is like in Finnish group homes where adults who have profound intellectual and multiple disabilities live their lives. Based upon ethnographic data, it documents how care workers strive to guarantee individuality and dignity against a backdrop of scarce resources and misguided policies. This book argues that the lives of people with profound disabilities need not be determined by their impairments. It calls for a re-evaluation of disability policy so that its underlying conviction of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities as equally valuable fellow humans would materialise in practice. This novel and accessible book combines ethnography and philosophy, and will be of interest to researchers and students in disability studies, special education and philosophy, as well as parents, professionals and policy makers. Endorsements from Readers For people with profound intellectual and multiple impairments, what is a good life? Who is responsible for trying to ensure that such a life is possible? This sobering, no-nonsense book about individual people who live in Finnish care homes is a timely and vital contribution to thinking about both the possibilities and the limitations of care, empathy and moral engagement. — Don Kulick, Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, Uppsala University This important book boldly challenges many pervasive and harmful assumptions about people with profound disabilities. Through powerful illustrations of how the external world can constrain, limit, and deny the worth of disabled persons, the authors confront difficult but essential questions that must be asked in order to combat ableism and enable flourishing. By combining philosophical analysis with in-depth research into lived experience and relationships, this book is a call to critically reconsider how meaning is assigned, and how moral values are embodied in everyday practices. Narrowed Lives boldly asserts that the varied and complex lives of people with profound disabilities need not be narrow at all. — Licia Carlson, Professor of Philosophy, Providence College Provocative… this book provides answers to questions of the human that unconsciously abound in any conception of intellectual disability and, crucially, urges all researchers to consider the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. — Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield

This article analyses COVID-19 stories of disabled young people describing their everyday experiences during spring 2020. Data consist of 14 entries submitted to the Corona Competition organized by the Supporting Foundation for Children and Youth with Disabilities. We ask how disabled young people narrate their lockdown experience. Our analysis focuses on the one hand on the hegemonic lockdown narratives and subject positions constructed with these and on narration of disability on the other. The findings highlight the variations in the narratives in relation to experiences of (mis)fitting. In many of the texts, lockdown is presented as not leading to changes in the narrator's sense of self or experience of disability. A few stories make visible how the lockdown has even diminished dominance of disability experiences in narrator's life. However, for some of the narrators, the lockdown has led to deepening sense of misfitting and amplified their experience of disability.

In recent decades, disability policy programmes and conventions have been underlining how improving educational opportunities, especially for post-compulsory education, improve the employability and independence of disabled people, and thus their position in society and as citizens. However, little attention has been paid to actual educational practices and how they relate to these policy objectives. This article focuses on post-compulsory education for students with learning disabilities in Finland, more precisely on a vocational training programme called Preparatory Education for Work and Independent Living (PEWIL). In our ethnographic study of the programme, we scrutinise how daily educational practices govern citizenship for its students. We argue that even though these students are perceived as 'trainable' mainly in sheltered work and as only able to live in an institutionalised setting-thus reproducing their marginalisation-they have internalised the idea of a neoliberal labour market citizen with an emphasis on independence and employability. Points of interest The subject of this article is a vocational education and training programme for young people with learning disabilities. The aim of the programme is to give students skills for working and independent living in mainstream society. We are interested in how citizenship is understood on the programme. The first author participated in the everyday life of the programme and interviewed students. We found that the programme prepares students to work in sheltered workshops and to live in group homes. In interviews, the students said they want to have regular paid jobs and live independently in their own flats. ; Peer reviewed

The article examines policies intended to promote the basic education of Roma and Traveller minorities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway by analysing key national Roma and Traveller policy (n = 5) and education policy documents (n = 3). Analysis shows how the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian Roma policies translate the general policy aims of improving the social positioning of people identifying as Roma consistently into policy measures responding to the special needs of Roma pupils. These policy measures are validated by problem representations regarding Roma parents and families. All the policies also problematise the relationship between Roma and Traveller cultures and schools. It is argued that the focuses of the current policy measures constrain opportunities for a change in terms of equality. ; Peer reviewed

Participatory approaches and co-research are increasingly employed in the current moment for exploring barriers to equality. Co-research treats research participants as experts in their own lives and as equal research partners. Research conducted with this orientation is based on research problems drafted by the research participants themselves from their aspirations regarding the research process and an active partnership that considers the interests of all parties involved. Participatory methods are used in co-research, particularly for the purpose of deepening the contextualisation of research knowledge about structurally vulnerable or subordinated groups and to challenge the power positions associated with traditional research designs. In co-research, the role of the people involved in the research is more central than in more traditional research. One of the key principles of co-research is that co-investigators (a) can participate in various roles, (b) have the opportunity to participate in different phases of the research according to their own interests and resources, and (c) co-investigators' participation can take many forms, including differences in intensity. The idea is to provide more people with opportunities to contribute to the knowledge production about themselves and their communities from their respective perspectives and interests. Co-research is also seen as an opportunity to improve the relevance and usefulness of scientific knowledge. It aims to genuinely increase interaction and openness and extend science's societal responsibility. In this book, we approach co-research as a means to promote social justice, as an action with a societal impact contributor to social impact and as a means to promote the societal responsibility of science. We discuss and evaluate the ideals of the co-research process concerning the everyday challenges and practices in research. Above all, we offer the knowledge and experience generated by our own projects to support those planning or already implementing co-research projects.