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The training and education of peers represents an important milestone in the peer's journey to work within organisational settings. Historically, peer support occurred based on a mutual relationship whereby one peer often with more experience provided support and guidance to another. However, as peers began to move into organisations staffed by professionals, a standard of training and education became needed if peers were to be accepted. This chapter outlines these issues, as well as discussing the training standards, the academics and soft skills needed. Some of the challenges peers face during their education and their continued development will be discussed. This chapter will focus on the training of peers for mental health and substance use settings in addition to other emerging areas in social inclusion.

Research regarding life in rural coastal communities in England has been limited, while the experience of families further marginalised by disability has been unresearched. To address this topic, a qualitative study was undertaken to explore the lives of families living with autism in rural coastal England. Twenty-two families from Cornwall and West Norfolk were interviewed in early 2019, including young people on the autism spectrum, their siblings, parents (some of whom were themselves also on the spectrum) and grandparents.

Perceived benefits of living in a rural coastal space were identified. These included the location, the sense of community and the sense of ‘going back in time’ as a positive experience. However, families also spoke of barriers and challenges associated with negative aspects of the location, the experience of stigma and intersectionality in relation to autism and rural coastal spaces. Difficulties concerning education, health and social care support were worsened by poor local infrastructure and the impact of a decade of austerity.

The qualitative methodology involving collaboration with families with autism in developing the research tools, participant recruitment and stakeholder validation is considered.

This research explored the intersecting impacts of rurality, coastality and disability to provide a novel and more nuanced understanding of such families' experiences. As such, it contributes to our understanding of those living ‘on the edge’ – regarding physical location, societal and educational marginalisation.

Peer work would previously have been associated with having a lived experience of mental health conditions and working with people in a relatable way to model that context. However, peer support work has since embraced a wider composition from the generic context, seeing that ethnic minorities face many health, social and psychological challenges, especially those deemed Refugees/Asylum Seekers (International Protection Applicants) on their journey to resettlement in host countries. The Health Service Executive's Social Inclusion office plays a crucial role in responding to the health needs of service users from underserved communities. The health and care needs of people from diverse ethnic, cultural and religious communities fall within the remit of the Health Service Executive Social Inclusion office nationally. The context for peer work in ethnic minority communities is that it is a pilot programme evaluated and endorsed as a national programme by the National Intercultural Health Group. It is evidence-based and aligned with national strategy/policy, with training options available to peer support workers. In the Southeast region of Ireland, communities vulnerable to health inequality targeted by the Social Inclusion team would range from Roma to Refugees and International Protection Applicants – formally known as Asylum Seekers. This chapter will focus on these ethnic populations and how peer support work is delivered in these contexts.

The United National Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) emphasises the need for those with disabilities to be guaranteed full access to participation in society (United Nations, 2006). This rights-based approach in higher education foregrounds the importance of removing practical and attitudinal barriers within how institutions, or staff, interact with students with traumatic brain injury (TBI) that facilitate their access. This chapter summarises the key findings of my PhD thesis where I use my unique positioning as a TBI survivor and status as a PhD student to gain deeper understanding of the experience of access for neurodiverse students in higher education. I contend that we can be marginalised in these settings. In this chapter, I argue for the importance of student voice in decision and policymaking processes in higher education, aligning with ‘nothing about us, without us’ (Charlton, 2000). A blended methodology of autoethnography and phenomenology was used in my scholarship, which meant listening to the perspectives of students with TBI who often navigate the educational environment differently. Loss, change of identity and care are significant factors in shaping experiences. This research has much to offer as it uses the researcher's and participant's voices to transform rather than maintain the status quo regarding access for students with TBI. Inclusive education must place flexibility and diversity at its core and consider the person when putting academic programmes and support in place.

This study used phenomenological narrative methodology to get insights into lived experiences of 10 Asian immigrant woman scholars in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in US institutions of higher learning. A feminist research approach overall guided the study. The concepts and theories of intersectionality, cultures of the academy, mindset, and mind tools framed the examination of the impacts of gender and work–family–community environments on the career pipeline of this group of women. The data were from two sources: (1) 48 documents on the participants and their institutions and (2) in-depth semi-structured interviews with these 10 participants. The findings show that gender and environment impacted the Asian women scholars’ career pipeline and advancement differently. On the negative side, barriers separately or jointly rooted in gender-based, racial, and hierarchical biases at stages of their career pipeline, from professional education to faculty appointment and leadership, challenged them. On the positive side, other gender-based and environmental agents and interventions supported them to overcome obstacles to their upward career mobility. This chapter has implications for how higher education institutions can improve their gender-based and environmental policies and praxis and facilitate the advancement of Asian immigrant women in STEM. It also has implications for how Asian women can prepare themselves to be successful in academic STEM careers.

This chapter will provide an overview of the lived experience and peer support context and draws on the origins of peer work in mental health arenas. The recovery movement will be discussed and peer support will be put in context as an alternative/adjunct/complimentary role to the predominant biomedical model. What is the role of peer support in mental health settings? What is it that a peer does on a day-to-day basis? What are the principles and practices that a person with lived experiences engages in to operationalise peer support? What are the outcomes associated with peer support working and what does peer work look like when it works well? What type of settings does the peer work in and what teams are they a part of? This chapter explores some of the challenges peers face when integrating into teams and organisations. The dominance of the biomedical model will be discussed and how this can potentially impact on the peer's role in these settings.

Lived experience has increasingly been incorporated into service delivery across health and social care settings. One of the methods used to do this is through the provision of peer support work. While many people will have lived experience of an issue, condition and may even work in services, peers are markedly different insofar as they are employed specifically because they are using this lived experience to explicitly inform their way of providing an intervention. As we will see throughout this book, peers are not a homogenous group; however, they do use some of the same processes to engage and offer support to people with a variety of health and social vulnerabilities. This chapter contextualises these issues before delving into further chapters authored and co-authored by those with lived experience across multiple areas of peer support work.

This research aims at explaining the phenomenon of the “black children” (heihaizi), a very little-known generation who lived with concealment under the one-child policy in China. The one-child policy was officially introduced to nationwide at the end of 1979 by permitting per couple to have one child only, later modified to a second child allowed if the first was a girl in rural China in 1984. It was officially replaced by a nation-wide two-child policy and most existing research focused on the parents’ sufferings and policy changes. The term “black children” has been mainly used to describe their absence from their family hukou registration and education. However, this research aims at expanding the meaning of being “black” to explain the children who were concealed more than at the level of family formal registration, but also physical freedom and emotional bond. What we do not yet know are the details of their lived experiences from a day-to-day base: where did they live? How were they raised up? Who were involved? Who benefited from it and who did not? In this way, this research challenges the existing scholarship on the one-child policy and repositions the “black children” as primary victims, and reveals the family as a key figure in co-producing their diminished status with the support of state power. It is very important to understand these children’s loss of citizenship and human freedom from the inside of the family because they were concealed in so many ways away from public view and interventions. This research focuses on illustrating how their lack of access to continued, stabilized, and reciprocally recognized family interactions framed their very idea of self-worth and identity.

In India, the population of persons with disabilities is estimated as 26.8 million of whom 15.7 million are in the age range 15–59 years (Census 2011). This has proved to be a challenge to the right to education, particularly when there is a situation of poverty and gender-specific issues, which along with disability, lead to further marginalisation. The study reported investigated factors that enabled and/or inhibited progress in the lives of people with disabilities who are doubly disadvantaged. The authors focused on the lived experiences of 14 persons with disabilities and collected data from them using semi-structured interviews. Interview responses were transcribed and coded and validated before grouping into themes of facilitators, inhibitors and opportunities for a better future. The results revealed that family support, support from members in the community and the confidence of persons with disability on their own capabilities were enabling factors. Lack of public awareness, poor facilities for continuing education, untrained teachers, lack of accessible environment and resources, the trauma of having to prove themselves to gain acceptance were inhibitors of their progress. Caregivers of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities expressed concern for their child's future. Poverty, living in remote areas and/or being a female formed further obstacles to accessing higher education and employment.