Congratulations to our colleagues on receiving a grant from the Russian Science Foundation!

The project 'People with Mental Disabilities in the Employment Process: Strategies, Barriers and Subjective Meanings of Participation' was prepared by Christian Fröhlich (leader), Daria Prisyazhnyuk, Maria Ivanova and Anna Sinelnikova.

Full social inclusion, a fundamental cause of well-being, still remains a precarious and unreached goal for people with disabilities. Organisations for the Disabled worldwide, international normative regulations and domestic public policy in most countries consider employment and participation on the labor market one of the most important tracks to the improvement of participation and well-being. Whereas people with physical and sensory impairments have reached broader public recognition of their problematic societal position related to their precarious access to the labor market, people with mental disabilities have been and still remain particularly excluded from society and all spheres of employment

This project is closing the lack of academic knowledge about the recipient site of inclusive politics and practices. In order to make inclusive policies and practices work effectively, they need to align with and relate to the understandings, interpretations and meanings employment has for the target group. Here, questions of how people with mental disabilities make sense of the inclusive practices and policies offered by state and non-state actors, and what meaning do employment and labor market activities have for their well-being, remain mostly outside the academic attention. Hence, our analytical focus is on the socially, institutionally and politically embedded perception and meaning-making of people with mental disabilities about work and labor market activities, and on the interaction between society and those who are labelled “mentally disabled” in pursuing labor market integration. Successful integration of the mentally disabled into the community is dependent on knowledge about their understanding of workplace possibilities, their motivations regarding labor market activities and their perception of support by NGOs and state agencies.

The proposed research project brings together colleagues, who so far have not yet worked together in this composition, but all having experience in the wider field of studying social inclusion of people with disabilities. The previous experience has made the lack of research on the social inclusion of people with mental disabilities and the related methodological challenges obvious which we aim to address in this project by developing our expertise into this new direction.