The paper at hand was embedded in an international project (CLASDISA) initiated by the University of Vienna. This project focussed on environmental factors that support or restrict activity and participation of school-aged children with disabilities in the field of education in different societal and cultural contexts. These different contexts had been given by including three capitals of different countries, namely Vienna (Austria), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Bangkok (Thailand), in the research design. The following discussion is based exclusively on the data from Ethiopia. The investigation is related to the field of special needs and inclusive education and the geographical focus lies on the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. The topic of the investigation is based on the aforementioned area of environmental barriers and facilitators for children with disabilities in primary schools. Conducting research in a foreign culture involves interesting challenges which must not be underestimated. International cooperation and interdisciplinary as well as intercultural research put the researcher into a new role and faces her with many more conflicts, negotiations and reflection processes than under other research circumstances, including conflicts that might emerge within the researcher herself.

The topic of interest for this research comprises a multitude of aspects such as disability, education, and children; other aspects of relevance are countries of the Majority world, development, and poverty, as well as culture, human rights, inclusion and equality.

The paper discusses the influence of environmental factors, thereby especially relationships and attitudes, on the education for children with disabilities in schools in Addis Ababa/ Ethiopia. The whole study is embedded in the framework of the pragmatist tradition with an orientation on the Chicago school of sociology (referring to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James). Taking a constructivist approach by using Grounded Theory (Charmaz), the researcher chose to speak to children with disabilities in school, parents, teachers and other experts as sources of information to reconstruct perceptions of disability from different perspectives in an educational environment. All these perspectives, including the one of the researcher, opened a compact set of views. During the field research, the focus of the initial research question “Which environmental factors facilitate or restrict activity and participation of school-aged children with disabilities in the field of education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia?” shifted. The final research question was:

“In which ways does the school access of children with disabilities support or hinder children, parents and teachers in dealing with emotional stress situations that are created through negative cultural and societal attitudes towards disability?

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