Legal peripheries: struggles over disAbled Canadians' places in law, society and space

Struggles against the socio-spatial marginalization of citizens disadvantaged by embodied differences such as race, gender, and mental or physical impairment, often focus on issues of legal rights. In Western neo-liberal democracies such as Canada, as Blomley and Pratt (this issue) illustrate, legal discourses help to map out who has a right to be where, who doesn't, and how conflicting rights in place, for instance between property-owners and their tenants, will be resolved. In this companion piece, I explore a different but related facet of changing geographies of legal rights: namely, the socio-spatial production of legal peripheries or places in which law as discursively represented and law as lived are fundamentally at odds. These are places of 'shadow citizenship and entitlement' - important to the cultural representation of neo-liberal democracies as inclusionary and tolerant of diversity, but lived as places of profound exclusion in which basic human rights are routinely denied. It is from such peripheral, disempowered locations that disabled Canadians are struggling to claim their places in law, society and space.