In Petrozavodsk, Russia, mothers of children with disabilities have successfully mobilized discourses of civil rights based on the guarantee of public education for every citizen in the constitution of the Russian Federation in order to obtain new educational opportunities for their children. This considers the particular factors that have encouraged the development of local parent organizations that are deploying tools like press conferences, public activism, and legislative lobbying to improve realities in their community. This study finds that international exchange, including a US government funded program on parenting children with disabilities in the mid-1990s, as well as mentorship from Finnish disability activists, have contributed significantly to successful lobbying of regional government to institute new special education programs in Petrozavodsk. These findings are based on ethnographic research from 2010 as well as previous ethnographic and library research into questions of disability and motherhood in Russia.
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Cassandra Hartblay, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was a 2011 Regional Policy Symposium [9] participant.
