Disabilities Project Initial Report

This report describes the processes, aims, and outcomes of the Disabilities Digital Archive, a project conducted as part of Arab and Muslim Women’s Research and Resource Institute’s vision to create data and oral histories regarding women’s experiences and transform them into meaningful information. To this end, this project seeks to explore gendered disability and facilitate more complex understandings of disability at the intersection of gender, culture, immigration, and other modes of identity. By collecting data from Muslim community members in Milwaukee, including people with differences of ability and their families, caregivers, Imams and religious scholars, community organization leaders, and health care/mental health professionals, it presents a fuller picture to break down stigma and increase access to resources for people with differences of ability.

 

The Stigma Attached to Disability is an Anathema to Religion

The “Gendered Disabilities” project is aimed at highlighting the need to support people with disabilities and the Muslim families caring for such persons. The project is rooted in the belief that every individual is equal regardless of the specific set of abilities they are able to utilize in life. Our abilities do not define us who we are as human beings, and our disabilities should not diminish our sense of self. Each person regardless of what he/she is able to do, has the right to live fully and free from stigma.

 

Nursing Perspective Regarding the Stigma Associated with Disability

The “Gendered Disabilities” project is an attempt to shed the light on the support needed for families caring for persons with disabilities, in general, and Muslim families caring for persons with disabilities, in particular. Without a doubt, stigma plays a major role in the ways in which different sociocultural groups experience disability. Therefore, understanding stigma as related to disability will help the health care professionals include strategies to reduce stigma and health disparities within minority communities.

 

The Impact of the Pandemic on Mental Health: Risk and Protective Factors Data Analysis from Reponses by Muslim and Arab Christian Participants

In 2019, a strain of coronavirus was identified in China and by March 2020, the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2021). The coronavirus pandemic resulted in high rates of hospitalization. Without a doubt, the pandemic impacted not only the physical but also the mental health of people. This report provides an overview regarding the impact of coronavirus on socialization and mental health among approximately twenty participants. Most of the participants are women, immigrants, and Muslims.

 

The Impact of the Pandemic on Religious Practices: Data Analysis from Reponses by Muslim and Arab Christian Participants

The following is a brief qualitative analysis based on interviews data and focusing on select questions regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 and the disruption in religious services.

The data examined for this report includes responses from over twenty men and women (most of them were women) concerning how (and if) they were impacted by the challenges in practicing their faith. Interviewees were overwhelmingly Muslim but there were also some who identified themselves as Christian. Most of them came from immigrant background.

 

Gendered Disabilities Report

This report presents our yearly progress in the third year of the Gendered Disabilities Project that aims to collect data and create a digital database on the experiences of Muslim women as people with disability or caretakers, including their access to healthcare services. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has influenced the structure of our research and has strong implications for our research topic, we have integrated the issue into our themes. Meanwhile, we adapted our methodology to the measures and thus conducted the interviews virtually. The remainder of this report first focuses on the integration of COVID19 research into the project, followed by the statistics of this year, and then concludes with the Disabilities Conference.