If you have either personal or professional experience of legal capacity and want to get involved in our exciting new project now is your chance!

We are looking for storytellers and respondents to participate in our research on legal capacity and law reform and attend the project’s first workshop in Galway on the 27^th and 28^th of April 2016.

At our April workshop in Galway, storytellers with personal experience of the law will come together with respondents who have a range of personal and professional experience – including human rights activists, policy-makers, researchers and practitioners with an interest in the right to legal capacity.

Storytellers

Do you have a story to tell about how the law has respected or refused to acknowledge your right, as a disabled person, to make decisions in your own life?

If so, we really want to hear your ideas for how the law needs to change to respect the rights of disabled people to make their own decisions. Please fill in an application form!

We are particularly interested in people with personal experience of the criminal justice system, people whose contractual capacity has been supported or questioned, stories about consent or refusal of medical treatment, and stories about relationships and consent to sex.

Respondents

Do you have personal experience of exercising legal capacity, or of supporting someone to have their wishes respected by the law?

Are you interested in developing creative solutions to the so-called ‘hard questions’ which Article 12 presents? These include how to respect legal capacity in crisis situations, and what the appropriate legal response should be when a person places themselves or others in danger. Please fill in an application form!

We are seeking a wide range of personal and professional expertise from our respondents and welcome expressions of interest from activists, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in a wide range of fields, including, but not limited to: law, sociology, politics, anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and economics.

Other ways to get involved

If you’re not sure whether you could commit to a two year process of working one to one with another person, but you have a story to tell, or an idea to contribute, there are lots of different ways to get involved. You can attend one of our events, write a post for this blog, make a video, or create a piece of art to display or perform at one of our workshops or conferences. You could also offer to be a facilitator at one of our workshops, or be a mentor for one of the pairs who will be working together on their stories and responses.

Our project has funding from the European Research Council to cover the travel and accommodation expenses of participants at our events. All those interested in attending the April workshop and taking part in the project generally must fill out the relevant application form (available here) and send it to ercvoices@nuigalway.ie by 11 March.