In a new year within which much has already changed, Disability Studies Quarterly seeks to remail a constant in advocating for the perspectives and needs of disabled people worldwide. The current issue offers a comparative look at disability in a variety of Western contexts, bringing you work from Canada, Portugal, France, and the United States. Many of these articles situate their studies within the context of government policies. Together they offer a comparative examination of the relationship between disability and the state in the West.

We begin in Canada, where Nadine Changfoot and her associates examine the efforts of Re*Vision, an arts-based research center in Ontario that works with equity-seeking communities and allies to transform systems, in producing a number of videos by disabled healthcare providers. Participants used their narratives to reframe their experience as disabled healthcare providers and the ethical issues associated with their work. In so doing, the authors argue that their work "disrupt[s] dominant conceptions of personhood that cast disabled embodiments as inherently vulnerable and dependent against the striving-for-autonomous, invulnerable embodiments of providers, and…transform[s] understandings of bodymind difference in healthcare discourses and dynamics." Further, they argue that "processual crip-ethics 'crips' autonomy by opening to the human-nonhuman relational ensembles that scaffold disabled people's agency toward social justice, and to the non-universalizable that creates new possibilities for health and care in specific instances."

Shifting the focus to First Nations, Walter Chan engages in a comparative policy analysis of Canadian disability rights and Indigenous organizations regarding disability issues within Indigenous populations. He finds that much like has been noted elsewhere, disability rights organizations in Canada have been largely inattentive to disability issues in minority populations, especially where Indigenous peoples are concerned. He argues that when working with Indigenous communities, the disability movement should listen to these communities and the knowledge holders who reside within these communities.

The next article moves us across the southern border and into the context of the military. Heather Powers Albanesi utilized qualitative interviews with US veterans with service-related injuries to determine how they negotiate military and civilian cultural meanings regarding disability. Her findings point out the need for engaging with emotional and embodied experience when conducting disability identity work. Interestingly, she proposes a concept of "injury capital" where meanings attached to service-connected disability are hierarchically ordered by factors like injury type (sexual, mental, physical), context (e.g. training, "friendly fire," out of country, "outside the wire," combat), severity of impairment, and the ubiquitous negative civilian perception of post-traumatic stress. In conceptualizing injury as a type of cultural capital, she suggests that it can become a potential resource toward achieving certain outcomes, such as employment. The study offers a new framework for conducting disability identity work.

Crossing the Atlantic, our next article lands us on the western shores of Europe and focuses on a country that has received scant attention from disability studies. Sara Leite Conceição's history of Portuguese disability policy in the 1960s examines the interplay between policy and culture during the ruling regime's vocational rehabilitation campaign. Conceição argues that as the regime's policies increased segregation, its rhetoric simultaneously framed disability oppression as the result of discriminatory ideas and representations, obscuring the material role that it and other parts of Portuguese society played in producing disability inequality.

Our final article moves us into France, where Madeline Burghardt examines the sexual abuse scandal, uncovered in 2020, within L'Arche, an international network of communities for adults with intellectual disabilities. Burghardt positions this abuse as an example of the spectrum of care and violence that exists in all caregiving situations rather than as an isolated incident of abuse. She uses this situation to evaluate the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities and the supports they need continue to be understood, raising considerations for future work with such populations.

Many of the articles in this issue study the impact of government policies and rhetoric, including the harm that governments have inflicted on disabled people in the West. With that in mind, the Editors feel compelled to condemn the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent comments denigrating the abilities, employability, and even the intrinsic worth of autistic people. These statements are contravened by decades of scholarship, much of which is contained within our pages. Disability Studies Quarterly has, since its inception, been dedicated to the presentation of the voices, perspectives, and advancement of people with disabilities and promoted disability rights, equality, and inclusion. We hope you will continue to support our work, whether by contributing to our parent organization, the Society for Disability Studies (https://www.patreon.com/SocietyforDisabilityStudies), volunteering to serve as a reviewer for the journal, or by submitting your work for publication.