Guided by feminist social constructionism, intersectionality and the social construction of disability, this thesis investigates the ways that sexual assault support workers and disability support workers in a medium-sized Ontario city construct women survivors of sexual assault who have a developmental disability, and how their service delivery reflects these constructions. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with sexual assault support workers and disability support workers. Results suggest that these workers construct their service users in multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways, resisting and reproducing several ableist and sexist social constructions. Furthermore, sexual assault support workers and disability support workers often construct their service users in opposing ways. This reveals a divide between the two types of organizations. Bridging this gap may have the potential to improve services for women survivors of sexual assault who have developmental disabilities.

Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) is a collaborative arts-based research project on the experiences that support workers have with enacting support, care and education practices in the disability support and education field. Five support workers were interviewed using arts-based and collaborative methods. Conversations focused on the disciplining power that policies, systems and structures have over the support practices provided to young people labeled with an intellectual disability. Questions were formulated on support worker experiences with enacting care, behaviour support, and curriculum. The following four issues were central to the inquiry: child development and the pressure for language acquisition; issues of consent in everyday practice and clinical spaces; the creation and enactment of behaviour plans; and disability labels and the diagnosis process. The in-depth, unstructured arts-based individual and group conversations were collaboratively designed with research participants, and topics of care, support and professional ethics were intentionally politicized. Conversations took place during the creation of poetry, painting and collage to grapple with practitioners’ own power in shaping the worlds of young people. By way of experimenting with diffractive approaches to analysis, assemblages of poetry, art and theory were created as thresholds for entry into the larger thesis assemblage. Transcripts and art were analyzed while thinking with various theoretical threads from critical disability studies, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and social justice, with the purpose of blurring and resisting harmful and normative support practices. This study shows that support workers are honouring the bodies and communications of resistance of the young people with disabilities they support. This study also shows support workers as deeply self-reflexive as they engage in critical practices in resistance to ableism. Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) has implications for informing research, training and education that grow support work practices to become increasingly consensual and designed with and for young people with a variety of disability labels. / Graduate

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In diploma thesis I have focused on employing of people with disability. I am asking what opportunities have disabled people in the labor market. Do they have possibility to join some special education programs to help them find a job? Is gender important in searching a job? Most of this diploma thesis is analytical. It is focused on priorities of the Government of Czech Republic as a member of the European Union. What kind of texts, laws or directives solve the employment people with disability. The analytical part consist of interviews with disabled men and women as well as people from the labor offices. Analysis of the interviews focused on their own experience with disability, perception of gender discrimination and experience with employment. I also introduce and analyze official documents to ensure gender equality in the labor market and documents that provide equality of people with disability in the labor market. Theoretical backround consist of Feminist disability studies as well as Robert McRuer's concept of "compulsory able-bodiedness". An important part is the perception of people with disability. I also describe historical context of this problem.

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