Maggie Mort – författare

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Disasters are an increasingly common and complex combination of environmental, social and cultural factors. Yet existing response frameworks and emergency plans tend to homogenise affected populations as ‘victims’, overlooking the distinctive experience, capacities and skills of children and young people.Drawing on participatory research with more than 550 children internationally, this book argues for a radical transformation in children’s roles and voices in disasters. It shows practitioners, policy-makers and researchers how more child-centred disaster management, that recognises children’s capacity to enhance disaster resilience, actually benefits at-risk communities as a whole.

As individuals increasingly seek ways of accessing, understanding and sharing data about their own bodies, this book offers a critique of the popular claim that ‘more information’ equates to ‘better health’. In a study that redefines the public, academic and policy related debates around health, bodies, information and data, the authors consider the ways in which the phenomenon of self-diagnosis has created alternative worlds of knowledge and practises which are often at odds with professional medical advice. With a focus on data that concerns significant life changes, this book explores the potential challenges related to people’s changing relationships with traditional health systems as access to, and control over, data shifts.

Self-organised user groups of social and health care services are playing an increasingly significant part within systems of local governance.Based on detailed empirical work looking at the user and 'official' perspective, this report includes studies of user groups and officials in two policy areas - mental health and disability. The authors examine both the strategies user groups adopt to seek their objectives, and explore conceptual issues relating to notions of consumerism and citizenship. Unequal partners thus contributes to our understanding of the role of user self-organisation in empowering people as consumers, and in enabling excluded people to become 'active' citizens.The authors discuss the way in which self-organisation may be supported without being controlled by officials in statutory agencies, highlighting the need to understand and distinguish between user self-organisation and user involvement.The report concludes that if policy makers are genuinely committed to greater user involvement in design, planning and delivery of services, then user self-organisation needs to be both encouraged and supported materially, without being 'captured' or incorporated into management. The research points to the significance of 'user groups' in challenging the exclusion of disabled citizens from all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life.Unequal partners is essential reading for health and social care policy makers and practitioners, lobby and pressure groups, students and academics in health and social policy and local government studies, and users.