Is childhood a 'disability'? Exploring the exclusion of children from age discrimination provisions in the Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 was enacted with the aim of simplifying existing equality legislation and included extending age discrimination protection beyond the workplace to cover the provision of goods, facilities and services. Under-18s, however, were omitted from such provisions, despite lobbying from a number of different organisations and parliamentarians. This article considers the significance of this exclusion. It both challenges the legitimacy of the decision to exclude children, and considers the difficulties that arise from including under-18s within age discrimination provisions, namely those relating to children’s autonomy, capacity and right to equal treatment. In particular, it asks whether the question of children’s capacity to make decisions, the main ground on which children are denied all the human rights enjoyed by adults, should be revisited in light of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, under which a finding of incapacity on the basis of disability constitutes discrimination. It goes on to explore other areas of convergence between childhood and disability studies, and particularly the benefits, and shortcomings, of a ‘social model’ approach to childhood.

Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture: Post-Millennial Perspectives of the End of the World

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world’s globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex – and, frequently, paradoxical – paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

Family Troubles? Exploring Changes and Challenges in the Family Lives of Children and Young People

As the everyday lives of children and young people are increasingly understood as matters of public policy and concern, the question of how we can understand the difference between normal” family troubles and troubled or troubling families has become more important. In this timely and thought-provoking book, a wide range of contributors address topics such as infant care, sibling conflict, divorce, disability, illness, substance abuse, violence, kinship care, and forced marriage, in an effort to explore how the concept of trouble features in normal families and how the concept of normal features in troubled families.