Living with Disability Research Centre Online Seminar

Neoliberalism, people with intellectual disabilities and the Disability Royal Commission

Both presentations for our July seminar will be co-presented by Jennifer Clegg and Richard Lansdall-Welfare, who are UK researchers and clinicians who are very familiar with the Australian policy context.

Their presentations will revolve around their new publication Intellectual Disability in a Post-Neoliberal World [link] and their recent analysis of the Disability Royal Commission.

Their work brings clarity to the key aspects of neoliberalism and its impact on policy and the design and delivery of services.

Email lids@latrobe.edu.au to register.

What Neoliberalism is and why it matters

The term ‘neoliberal’ has been deployed to disagree with a wide range of positions, obscuring its fundamental concepts and strategies.

Drawing on their new Palgrave Pivot book, Intellectual Disability in a Post-Neoliberal World, the speakers introduce research from politics, sociology, and philosophy to detail neoliberal ideology and how its ‘devil take the hindmost’ strategy spread from economics to politics and policy in the 1980s.

Hornberg (2023) introduced the term ‘cultural homogenisation’ to capture the way that neoliberalism has recently combined with social media to spread its ideology further. By analogy with a process that spreads fat globules in milk uniformly, this describes how the same ideas have become distributed and sustained internationally while good alternatives fail to gain traction.

This presentation focuses on what analyst Power called ‘datafication.’ The ever-increasing requirement that staff spend time collecting data that monitors what they do: its negative impacts, and what they could do instead

How Neoliberal promotion of Voice, Choice and Work led the Royal Commission astray

This presentation offers a critique of the Disability Royal Commission’s recommendations by revealing the way neoliberal ideology has shaped its recommendations. It argues that:

• Neoliberal individualism and its focus on choice and autonomy has generated concern to provide accessible information, irrespective of its feasibility; and concern to eliminate restrictive practices, irrespective of equally important needs of staff and parents.
• “Datafication” that is intended to monitor and improve otherwise unregulated markets is expensive, ineffective, and impedes engagement.
• The Commission envisaged that meaningful adult life is characterised by having paid work, despite a meagre and shrinking number of people with intellectual disabilities obtaining jobs.
• The significant limitations of a legal inquiry are identified.
• Alternatives to the promotion of voice, choice, and work are explored. Rather than continuing to enact neoliberal solutions, two different initiatives that are more likely to disrupt the status quo are proposed: replacing legal intervention with public health approaches to reducing violence in all settings; and developing new “counter-publics” of fun and belonging that connect people and their consociates.

Jennifer Clegg is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Australia, where she developed and taught for four years the course 'Non-behavioural Approaches to Challenging and Complex Needs' for the Masters in Disability Studies.

For 25 years she was both an Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist in Nottingham, UK, carrying out research and clinical intervention with distressed adults who have intellectual disability and their parents and staff.

She has published 48 peer-reviewed articles, nine book chapters and two books: Critical Issues in Clinical Practice (SAGE, 1998), and New Lenses on Intellectual Disabilities (Routledge, 2020).

Richard Lansdall-Welfare worked as a Clinical Director and Consultant Psychiatrist in Nottinghamshire, UK, with adults who have intellectual disability and their families.

His practice was both community and in-patient based, and involved the full-range of mental health difficulties experienced by people with intellectual disabilities.

He implemented specialist services for those with additional needs such as epilepsy, nutritional difficulties and complex neurodevelopmental conditions, also contributing to service modelling at national and international level.

He has published 10 peer-reviewed articles.