Politics concerns us! Study circle material produced with and for disability organizations

This project aims to make the results from the Forte-financed project Avoidable Deaths? The Politics of Intellectually Disabled People´s Life Expectancy accessible for disability organizations. The project will, in close dialogue with different disability organizations, produce a material for study circles.

In the ongoing project Avoidable Deaths?, Matilda Svensson Chowdhury and Niklas Altermark investigate life opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities during the 20th century. The results from this ongoing project will be published in both scientific and popular science journals.

These platforms tend, however, to be inaccessible to persons with intellectual disabilities and their organizations.The new project will involve an external researcher, Mikael Mery Karlsson, who will be working together with several disability organizations in order to produce a study circle material that can be used by several disability organizations.

The material deals with questions about politics, political influence and human rights.

It consists of both texts in accessible Swedish and questions for discussion adapted for persons with intellectual disability.

Mery Karlsson has extensive experience in public education, including being a recurring study circle leader for the National Association Grunden, a non-profit organization for and by persons with intellectual disabilities.The disability organizations RBU, the Swedish Association of the Deaf, FUB and JAG have been involved already from the beginning of the existing research project Avoidable Deaths?

This dialogue will continue throughout the new project.

This way, the new project will contribute to make the research more accessible, both through the written product, the study material, and through the continuous dialogue between the research team and the disability organizations.Previous research has shown that persons with intellectual disability participate in politics to a lesser extent than the average population, both in terms of voting in general elections and in terms of being active in political parties.

Public education has a vital role in changing this.

This way, the project will contribute to Agenda 2030 and to realize the goals of good education for all and to reduced inequality.