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More than 40 years of war, ethnic conflict, violence and poverty have made Afghanistan a country where at least one in five live with a serious physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychosocial disability. Women with disabilities in Afghanistan are considered to be ‘doubly stigmatized’ due to gender inequality and disability stigmatization, and are often hidden from the social and political aspects of life. Although in the post-Taliban era, development interventions backed by international aid have been designed to include women with disabilities, their intersectionalities cutting across class, ethnicity, region, different types of impairments and other positionalities have not been explored to address different needs, barriers and inequalities across various regions. In this context, the Covid 19 crisis has made the lives of Afghan women with disabilities harder due to gender discrimination, stigma and shame, unemployment, lack of mobility, lack of awareness, and insufficient institutional support and infrastructure coupled with widespread feelings of insecurity resulting from conflict and terrorist attacks. Based on both primary and secondary data, this paper will shed a feminist intersectional insight into the plight of women with dis/abled experience during the Covid 19 pandemic in the complex political and social terrain of Afghanistan. The paper will also explore visions for designing interventions aimed at integrating women with disabilities in post Covid development plans.

Participation is a little discussed or researched concept in the social sciences, despite its importance in understanding activism. This article presents some theoretical and methodological considerations for promoting social participation and agency for disabled people through the work of psychologists associated with Brazilian public policies. This article takes the form of a discursive study, based on the dialogue between: a) Brazilian legislation on disability; b) Bader Sawaia’s Ethical-Political Psychology; and c) Disability Studies. Based on the assumption that psychological practices should promote participation and agency for disabled people, we present the elements that hinder or control participation. We then present theoretical methodological contributions to build practices that promote participation and agency, highlighting: a) critiques of moral and biomedical models of disability; b) understandings of disability from intersectional perspectives that incorporate it as a category of analysis; c) including disabled people in the construction of research and professional practices disabled people and d) the rupture with ableism, which blocks the participation of disabled people. Participation has shown to be a multidimensional concept that covers a spectrum of aspects – from the practice of activism to the constitution of subjectivity in disabled people.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 2

Drawing from qualitative research and over five years of relationship-building with women in Labrador, Canada, this article explores the intersections of Indigenousness, disability and gender. Labrador offers a unique perspective with its three Indigenous nations, including one Indigenous self-government and settler populations; its remote and Northern location; and its long history as a site for resource exploitation, global military presence and colonial displacements. We explore how these features shape the experiences of women with disabilities, including in rejecting the label of ‘disability’ and finding spaces in their communities of both inclusion and exclusion. Understanding the experiences of women with disabilities in Labrador requires recognizing the disabling consequences of colonization and the fast-track urbanization that has accompanied resource development in the region. We highlight some Indigenous models of inclusion that are already working and can provide an opportunity for service providers, governments and those living in communities to learn from them.

Disability and the Global South, 2018, Vol.5, No. 2

This paper explores the complex intersections of race, gender and disability, whilst offering a critical reflection on how disability studies discourse and ecofeminist approaches together elucidate a subjectivity that is unique, distinct and influential in generating participatory action research knowledge. Reflection and insights are based on empirical work with small-scale farmers (mainly women) in the central region of Uganda carried out for a PhD study. The study aimed to illuminate the broad and complex livelihood experiences of domestic banana (staple crop) cultivators and their perceptions of bio-technological intervention in the form of banana tissue culture (TC) and the associated processes. Subjectivity between the researcher and respondents is a two-way process. As a researcher who is disabled woman using a wheelchair, working in the field required much adaptation physically and mentally. Equally, my disability shaped respondents’ perceptions of me as a person, a researcher as well as their responses. In fact, arguably, my disability facilitated unusual circumstances and opened up doors to sensitive questions, personal accounts and a mutual rapport between the farmers and myself. The influence of the disabled research subject fostered exceptional conditions to propagate inclusive investigative methods to represent ‘the lived experience’ of the farmer in a procedure not often applied in agricultural research.

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3