Towards Equity: Services for Disabled Children and Youth

Dear Colleagues,

Disabled children’s lives are imbricated in services and supports that take shape globally. This Special Issue critically considers what counts as “service” in the lives of disabled children and youth, with an aim to share transnational knowledge about how disabled children and youth receive, deliver, interact with, and resist services in various contexts.

As two white scholars based in Canada, the editors come to this issue with an understanding that services and support often materialize and universalize Western responses to disability. “Service” is an ambition uncritically transferred across various nation-states and sectors (Mehrotra, 2020). Sometimes this transference happens on a global scale. For example, major industries such as education and healthcare animate international service and support commitments, including those outlined in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Understandings of service are often limited to a Western imaginary that assumes disabled people across transnational spaces share similar experiences, despite evidence generated by decolonial disability studies holding that services located in North American and Western European nation-states are not universal (Nguyen, 2023). By contrast, disability theory in the Global South consistently resists impositions of Global North service, refusing to limit understandings of service to a Western imaginary that homogenizes disabled children’s experiences. Disentangling disabled children’s lives from services that are founded in developmentalism is both challenging and, for many disabled people, undesirable and perhaps impossible. We are interested in alternative approaches that present a new vision for community, engaged and informed by disabled people’s actual experiences and desires.

Given that it requires several voices to explore disabled children and youth’s services on a transnational scale, the editors invite submissions from a variety of contexts that interrupt and interrogate charity-based, unidirectional understandings of service. The Special Issue’s focus on disabled children and youth—and their experiences with service—speaks to the many ways in which transnational services are built on and around the lives and experiences of disabled young people. Community interventions rooted in young people’s activism and social justice movements represent important supports, and, in some cases, respond to and resist service interventions. These actions have us looking closely at the business of service and its implications for disabled young people. In appreciating that service and business are intertwined via global capitalism, the editors also critique goals of equity. Goals of equity raise questions about the value of disabled young people’s lives and experiences in relation to service production and delivery: In what ways do services build equity when disabled children and youth are understood as assets worthy of investments? If equity is both a measurement of assets and a gesture toward fairness, what role do disabled children and youth play in global-scale service production?

Taking a critical and multi-directional approach to understanding “service,” this collection will illustrate how much there is learn about how complexly services emerge, and are experienced, transnationally. The collection will reflect a global community of scholarship commenting on “service” as it emerges in the lives of disabled children and youth.

Recognizing unequal relations of power between disability scholars in the Global North and South, the editors invite submissions from both realms that critically reinterpret mainstream, Western understandings of service. Submissions will describe how “service” manifests transnationally and in relation to the lives of disabled children and youth. Submission topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Decolonial disability studies’ interpretations of “service”;
• Community interventions on/responses to “service”;
• Disabled children and youth’s reactions to/reflections on services;
• Critiques of developmentalism, healthism, sanism, and/or assimilation in service delivery;
• Anticolonial approaches to resisting and/or advancing “service”;
• Intersections of “service” with disability justice;
• Interdependence and accessibility in relation to “service”;
• Refusals and/or rejection of services by/for disabled children and youth;
• Intersectional interpretations of service experiences;
• Services produced in the interest of transnational solidarity.

Proposed abstracts (300–500 words) for research articles can be emailed with the subject line “Services Special Issue” to Drs. Chelsea Jones and Kathryn Underwood at cjones@brocku.ca by the deadline of 3 November 2025. Abstracts should include the following:

• A plan for the article (i.e., research question, methodology, findings, discussion, significance);
• References for any work cited in the abstract;
• Names of author or authors, as well a 200-word bibliography for each author that includes their affiliations and email addresses.

Submissions will undergo a multi-stage process of peer review, beginning with a friendly review by the guest editors. Contributors will be notified of the decision on their abstract by (DATE). Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee inclusion in the Special Issue.

References

• Mehrotra, Mili, and Karthik V. Natarajan. "Value of combining patient and provider incentives in humanitarian health care service programs." Production and Operations Management 29, no. 3 (2020): 571-594.
• Nguyen, Xuan Thuy. "Towards a decolonial approach to disability as knowledge and praxis: Unsettling the ‘colonial’ and re-imagining research as spaces of struggles." In Intersectional Colonialities, pp. 233-251. Routledge.

Dr. Chelsea Temple Jones
Prof. Dr. Kathryn Underwood
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• disabled children and youth
• transnational services
• service experiences
• community interventions
• intersectional interpretations