Hamid is a researcher and civil society practitioner. His current research and practice focus is on disability rights, ableism, and neurodiversity and promoting the social model of disability as a tool to address institutional and discursive roots of inequality and exclusion experienced by individuals with a disability.
He has worked as a facilitator and trainer of child rights workshops for teachers, volunteers, and staff members of civil society organisations. He has also served as a policy analyst, consultant, and researcher in NGOs and the public sector. His research experiences include civil society organisations typology, the right to education, and the 4As scheme, and inequality, focusing on marginalised groups such as disabled children, refugee children, and working children.
In his practice as a policy analyst and consultant, Hamid worked with municipalities and NGOs, providing rights-based policy recommendations on spatial violence, refugee populations, and legal provisions for child rights protection. By writing and translating several reviews, articles and commentaries in media, he has also contributed to the debates within the civil society on social justice, addressing social inequalities, child protection and civil society mobility.
During his undergraduate studies in mid 2005s, he started to work as a volunteer with service providing NGOs for Afghan refugee and asylum seeker children in Tehran. After a few years of voluntary work, he and his colleagues started a literacy and basic education project for refugee children, and he served the project as manager. Then, he started a similar project in another NGO but with a Freirean, more participatory, and community-oriented approach.
I believe change is born through a process in which participation, the root of the problem, and inclusion are at the heart of, and by which relations between local issues, and structural and historical injustice, if not directly tackled, are acknowledged and understood.Hamidreza Vasheghanifarahani