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Tackling social exclusion, which can lead to social isolation and loneliness, is an important current issue. People with a learning disability have a right to be full members of their communities, yet often experience social exclusion. Community connections play a key role in people developing reciprocal relationships. It is therefore important to know the barriers to full inclusion. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper builds on an inclusive research project exploring these issues (Mooney et al., 2019) and aims to place that study’s main findings in a broader academic, policy and practice context.

Whilst there is a wide range of literature about social exclusion, lack of friendships and loneliness experienced by people with a learning disability, there is a gap in knowledge regarding some of the specific social barriers that prevent wider social inclusion, and therefore opportunities to make and keep friends.

This paper relates the findings of an inclusive research project to the current literature. It identifies the social barriers that limit community involvement and draws on the experience of people with a learning disability to find possible ways forward.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Stacey and Edwards' article on a narrative therapy approach to working with men with learning disabilities who are lonely.

The article reflects on the issues raised by Stacey and Edwards, in the light of other theoretical and empirical literature on loneliness and friendship.

It is important to consider problems of loneliness in the context of a social model of disability. People with learning disabilities are often excluded from the networks of relationships that are so important to the maintenance of emotional well‐being.

Overcoming loneliness is likely to require a range of strategies including group action by people with learning disabilities, the development of non‐disabled people's ability and willingness to establish relationships with disabled people and developments in our understanding of how social systems can be designed to be more inclusive.

This chapter considers the value of visual analyses for studying social movements through a study of pro-life uses of images of the fetus in the Australian abortion debate. In doing so, it points to important connections between the study of emotions in politics and visual approaches to social movement studies. It also contributes new primary material on the politics of reproduction through its study of the Australian pro-life movement, on which little has been written. Through discursive analysis of visual materials and practices embedded in three case studies, I demonstrate the range of strategies being used; their selection was informed by a wider survey of available records of pro-life uses of images of the fetus over the past four decades. Emotion is a powerful element of politics, and images of the fetus challenge the emotions, and hence the humanity, of the viewer. I identify three major themes represented in pro-life images of the fetus: the wonder of life; the human form and human frailty of the fetus; and the barbarity of modern society. The meanings of these images are built on our parallel understandings of both sight and emotion as immediate and unmediated. Moreover, the ambiguities and dualities of images of the fetus make their themes more, rather than less, persuasive.

This chapter considers how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in Namibia and South Africa appropriate discourses of decolonization associated with African national liberation movements. I examine the legal, cultural, and political possibilities associated with LGBT activists’ framing of law reform as a decolonization project. LGBT activists identified laws governing gender and sexual nonconformity as in particular need of reform. Using data from daily ethnographic observation of LGBT movement organizations, in-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists, and newspaper articles about political homophobia, I elucidate how Namibian and South African LGBT activists conceptualize movement challenges to antigay laws as decolonization.

Based on an ethnographic study of a restaurant called the “Hungry Cowboy,” I examine how servers make use of sexual harassment claims within a sexually overt work culture. Focusing on the dynamics of a specific case, I explore how participation in sexual talk and touch provides positive rewards for some workers, operating as a source of craft pride, while laying the groundwork for exclusion of other workers. This study reveals how intersectionality plays out in the day-to-day behaviors and practices that make up workplace cultures, how white workers use a gendered tool to filter racism, the intentional manipulation of workplace culture by workers, and the unintended outcomes of sexual harassment laws.