The aim of ENIL’s Independent Living Research Network (ILRN) is to facilitate communication and development of joint initiatives among researchers who focus in their work on Independent Living (IL) and kindred topics such as deinstitutionalisation, personal assistance, Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and others.
Background: Research on IL has been mounting over the last forty years, following the pioneering efforts of IL campaigners and activists in the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Since its inception in 1989, the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) has also been involved in research on IL to support its mission to advocate for IL. However, so far, IL-related research initiatives with international scope and significance have mostly been carried out in isolation, driven by the efforts of individual campaigners, researchers and/or research institutes. ILRN will help overcome this fragmentation by devising a structured effort at facilitation of international and cross-sectoral collaborations on IL-related research.
Scope: ILRN will include researchers from Europe and other parts of the world who focus in their work on IL and kindred topics. ILRN welcomes disabled and non-disabled members working independently or within civil society organisations, international organisations, academic institutions, think tanks and government agencies.
Existing resources: ENIL has already developed several elements of its ILRN, including a database of researchers engaged in IL-related research and an IL Reading list.
For more information about ILRN, to register in the database of IL researchers and to access the IL reading list, please click here. We also welcome suggestions for joint research projects and other collaboration opportunities, as well as suggested entries for the IL reading list.
Contact person: Teodor Mladenov, ILRN Coordinator, tmladenov001@dundee.ac.uk
