Thammasat University students interested in Asian studies, allied health sciences, human rights, political science, sociology, anthropology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 11 December Zoom webinar on Disability Matters Online Symposia 2024: Disability in the Geopolitical South.
The event, on Wednesday, 11 December 2024 at 10pm Bangkok time, is organized by the The University of Sheffield, The United Kingdom.
The event announcement explains:
Disability Matters is a major pan-national programme of disability, health and science research. This free, online event is on 11th December, and we are asking three speakers the question “How does your area of research engage with disability in the geopolitical south and challenge dominant epistemologies and paradigms of disability?”. We will also have time for open discussion and questions. […]
Speakers
- Jiya Pandya
Jiya Pandya is a scholar of transnational disability studies currently working on a concept history of “disability” in postcolonial Indian welfare as a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Their work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, History of Anthropology Review, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.
- Vishnu KK Nair
Vishnu KK Nair, PhD is trained as a speech and language therapist and a critical scholar of communication disability. Currently, he is a lecturer in the school of psychology and clinical language sciences at University of Reading. His research focuses on understanding communication disability utilising critical, decolonial and global southern epistemologies.
- Ankita Mishra
Ankita Mishra, PhD, is the Research Associate: Health Priorities for Disability Matters at The University of Sheffield. Her research, teaching and scholar activism is interdisciplinary using participatory and creative approaches in her work with marginalised communities affected by intersectional oppression. She draws upon critical community psychology, Black feminism, critical race theory, critical disability studies and decolonial theory in her research and practice.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Asia and disability rights.
Students are invited to register at this link for the event:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/disabilitymatters/1451083
An Open Access academic journal, Disability and the Global South, addresses the subject of the symposium. Its website explains:
Aims and Focus
Disability and the Global South (DGS) is the first peer reviewed international journal committed to publishing high quality work focused exclusively on all aspects of the disability experience in the global South. It provides an interdisciplinary platform prioritising material that is critical, challenging, and engaging from a range of epistemological perspectives and disciplines. DGS is hosted at and published by The Critical Institute.
We welcome material from a broad range of areas including disability studies, international development, anthropology, postcolonial theory, rural development, global health, Latin American Cultural Studies, psychology, and feminisms. DGS is not confined in focus to any region, but is particularly interested in areas that remain underrepresented, in particular Latin America.
The journal encourages contributions from disabled activists and theorists from the global South. Our objective is to provide a safe space to critique and challenge the Westerncentrism in dominant disciplines and practices, and the imperialism in the production of ‘knowledge’ and its dissemination.
DGS welcomes research-based and theoretical contributions in English and Spanish and is open to a wide range of themes including (not exclusively):
- Poverty and disability
- War, conflict and displacement
- Health and rehabilitation
- Livelihoods and education
- Cultural constructions of disability
- Colonialism
- Neoliberal globalisation, international development and contemporary Empire
- Religion and spirituality
- Intersectionalities
- Post/neocolonial spaces and identities
- The language of rights in practice
- Researching disability across cultures, indigenous and decolonizing methodologies
- Frequency
The journal is published 2 to 3 times a year.
Open Access
This is an open access journal with the set aim of making all content in its entirety free for everyone and everywhere. All material can be freely downloaded and shared with others under a Creative Commons License. Our open access policy is motivated also by the need for material to circulate beyond academic circles into public spaces where it can be more effectively used. […]
Earlier this year in the periodical Frontiers in Health Services, an article was published: Theories and practices of disability from the Global South: a critical anthropological perspective.
The article began:
“Critical disability studies” (CDS) is an interdisciplinary field of research that examines social, political, economic, racial, gendered and historical constructions of bodily non-normativity across different geopolitical areas and scales. Despite its diverse and multiple contributions and objectives, current research in critical disability studies has been described as mainly focusing on disability issues in the Global North and as having universalizing tendencies.
In this context, intersubjective perspectives and empirical data offered by ethnographic works in medical and disability anthropology and related disciplines have been either in accord or tension with the broader field of CDS. On the one hand, this review article illustrates the many ways anthropologists have adopted various research perspectives to explore bodily non-normativity outside settings in the Global North.
On the other, it shows the importance of research by anthropologists working on topics related to disability, as well as their recent fruitful collaborations with CDS scholars and approaches. By exploring these epistemological and empirical entanglements, this paper concludes that deeper engagements between CDS and anthropology, as well as a more thorough focus on the ethnographic analysis of bodily non-normativity, can open new creative routes for the analysis of disability in various world contexts.
Introduction
Writing, analyzing, and examining diverse forms of bodily difference1 and their sociocultural representations and manifestations worldwide is a challenging endeavor. Critical disability studies (CDS), or critical disability theory (CDT)2, includes interdisciplinary approaches to analyze disability as a socio-political, historical, and cultural phenomenon that is shaped by symbolic and sociocultural structures, political ideas, literary representations, narratives and practices in various world settings. Scholars in this broad field strive to denaturalize disability and question how it is defined in terms of the Global North.
The field of critical disability studies is an interdisciplinary arena not only for understanding bodily “alterity” but also advancing forms of activism and advocacy that can expose historical and sociocultural norms, prejudices and biases that categorize certain bodily characteristics as non-normative.
Further complementary focuses include the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts that produce stigma and marginalization as well as agentic practices of resistance against these attitudes. Therefore, CDS challenges white and mestizaje-based ableist ideas of disability politics in societies, institutions and ideologies.
While sharing certain methodologies and perspectives with the “social model of disability”, some scholars in CDS criticize previous approaches for their liberal perspectives, narrow focus on physical disabilities, and emphasis on Global North contexts and concepts like “independent living,” as well as their entanglements with neoliberalism, masculinity, white supremacy and somatophobia. Moreover, previous models and scholarly trends pay little attention to racial and linguistic differences in the analysis of disability issues.
A primary research goal in CDS is therefore to foster collaboration and networks of solidarity that include “marginalized” individuals who may not identify as disabled but experience forms of “devaluation” or pathologization. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)