Project description
Empowering individuals with disabilities and linguistic minorities
Disabled people and linguistic minorities are two marginalised groups facing daunting challenges. Though diverse, they share a common struggle against social disadvantages and discrimination. Despite remarkable progress in advocating for their rights, societal misconceptions and exclusion still hinder their full participation and integration into society. The MSCA-funded HUMVAR project will address these challenges by adopting the human variation model (HVM), defending and redefining its interpretation as a model that responds to disability discrimination, justifying environmental reconstruction. Redefining the HVM as a discrimination-based model will contribute to a better understanding of disability accommodation and discrimination. By expanding the HVM’s principles to encompass linguistic diversity, HUMVAR strives to create a more inclusive and just society that values accommodating environments over changing individual impairments.
Objective
HUMVAR is a project in applied ethics, and it adopts the framework of a particular disability model, the human variation model (HVM). The goal of HUMVAR is to advance research on the HVM, and it has three objectives: first, to provide a philosophical defense of the HVM. HUMVAR’s interpretation of the HVM shows that an important aspect of disability disadvantage is caused by exclusive environments. This causation story grounds societal responsibility and justifies the provision of more accommodating environments —the favored policy response of social models of disability. The first objective defends this interpretation against the challenge that social models of disability cannot justify the policy of environmental reconstruction. HUMVAR’s second objective is to redefine the problem of disability that the model articulates as a special case of discrimination (discrimination-as-human-variation). Discrimination-as-human-variation is a revisionary account of the HVM, as the original version of the model aims to be an alternative to discrimination-based approaches to disability. This revisionary interpretation explores that disability-as-human-variation is a form of ableism. The third objective is to expand the idea of human variation to the case of linguistic diversity and justice, showing that the logic of the HVM is present in other spheres of social life beyond disability. HUMVAR makes the case that minority languages are also disadvantaged by their social environment and vulnerable to discrimination-as-human-variation. It also examines the case of sign language through the lens of linguistic justice to find a novel answer to why changing individual impairments is problematic from a moral point of view. HUMVAR's answer is that society’s insistence on changing individual impairments instead of providing accommodating environments is a case of wrongful assimilation.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark