A book launch and conversation with Professor Elizabeth Evans and Dr Stefanie Reher.
How and why are representative politics failing disabled people? What can we do about it?
In Disability and Political Representation, Elizabeth Evans and Stefanie Reher show how the representative process works and doesn’t work for disabled people – and also how thinking about disability can help us develop and improve our ideas about political representation in general.
Using a wide range of evidence, Evans and Reher demonstrate that there are significant ableist barriers preventing disabled people from fully participating in the political process, both as voters and as elected representatives. They argue that increasing the number of disabled politicians matters, since their lived experiences can benefit the representation of disabled people. To address these issues, they develop the concept of experiential representation. Disability and Representation not only identifies and analyses the problems of representative politics but, importantly, offers a range of solutions for how to make politics more accessible and more effective for everyone.
Elizabeth Evans is Professor of Politics at University of Southampton. Her research explores the relationships between social movements, political parties, and political representation. Elizabeth held an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship in 2021. Stefanie Reher is a Reader in the School of Government & Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research focuses on political representation and citizen attitudes and behaviour, and particularly on the role of disability.
Elizabeth and Stefanie are joined by two panelists: Dr Sarabajaya Kumar, Associate Professor in Voluntary Sector Policy and Leadership at UCL; and Dr Alison Wilde, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Nothumbria University. A Q&A follows, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.
This event is the thirty-third in the ISRF’s series of Book Launches.