Essex Autonomy Project Summer School / Summit 9-11 August 2023: registration now open

Registration is now open for the 2023 Summer School, which will take place over the course of three days at the Wivenhoe House Hotel and Conference Centre on the Colchester Campus of the University of Essex.

In the words of the Essex Autonomy Project:

This year’s Summer School presents an opportunity to pause and take stock of recent progress (and continuing obstacles!) in the long struggle for legal recognition and human rights for persons living with disabilities.

It was not long ago that the concepts of “supported decision-making” and “inclusive legal capacity” were known mainly as radical ideas in the discourse of a few activists and academics.  There followed a period of innovative research and pilot programmes around the world, setting out to demonstrate and validate a real and viable alternative to the traditional approaches of guardianship and best-interests decision-making.  We are now living through an exciting new period in which these concepts are taking their place in statutes and civil codes around the world.

The 2023 Autonomy Project Summer School brings together leading activists who have helped to achieve this remarkable result.  They will be joined by an international group of students, researchers, policy makers, and frontline professionals in medicine, law, and social work, along with service users, civil servants and government officials. We will review recent progress and setbacks, reflect on lessons learned, review the most recent research, and work together to plot the way forward.

Some specific questions:

• How are laws here in the UK and around the world being reformed to achieve greater inclusion for persons living with disabilities?
• How can concrete practices of care be modified to ensure respect for the human rights of care recipients?
• What does it mean to respect for the rights, will and preferences of persons in care settings?
• How should practices of supported decision-making and advance choices be regulated?
• What is the state-of-the-art in research on interpretative support for the exercise of legal capacity?

For this 13^th incarnation of the Summer School, we will adopt a cross-cultural approach to the challenges, with particular attention to recent developments in Scotland (which has recently completed an intensive review of mental health and mental capacity legislation), Japan (which was recently reviewed by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and where new pilot programs are underway), Australia and Canada (which have long been global leaders in developing new forms of recognition for decision-making support).

Early bird registration closes on 1 May.   For more details, and to book, see here.