Resources search

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.

In this paper, we present a collection of decolonizing inclusive practices for elementary education that we have found effective when implementing them in postcolonial countries. The choice and implementation of such practices was informed by the intersectional and interdisciplinary theoretical framework of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit), and guided by decolonizing methodologies and community-based participatory research (CBPR). The main purpose of this paper is to show how critical theoretical frameworks can be made accessible to practitioners through strategies that can foster a critical perspective of inclusive education in postcolonial countries. By doing so, we attempt to push back against the uncritical transfer of inclusion models into Southern countries, which further puts pressure on practitioners to imitate the Northern values of access, acceptance, participation, and academic achievement (Werning et al., 2016). Finally, we hope to start an international dialogue with practitioners, families, researchers, and communities committed to inclusive education in postcolonial countries to critically analyze the application of the strategies illustrated here, and to continue decolonizing contemporary notions of inclusive education.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2020, Vol. 7 No. 1

The purpose of this paper is to explore ex-combatants’ understandings of disability and the pathways for social reintegration available to them in Colombia. The qualitative data for the study include seven in-depth interviews with ex-combatants and 29 with key informants, including disabled people’s organisations, government agencies, international organisations and academic groups. Findings suggest that transition to civilian life for ex-combatants is made more difficult by inadequate procedures, lack of support and complex administrative data vacuums. Social determinants, historical prejudice against persons with disabilities, high levels of unemployment and political polarisation in a post conflict context combine to trigger poverty traps. The findings indicate pitfalls in the early implementation of the Colombian peace process, which did not consider structural issues that affected transition to civilian life for ex-combatants with disabilities. Furthermore, key enablers for social inclusion such as peer-to-peer support have been identified by respondents. This paper concludes that more needs to be done to enhance the voices of ex-combatants with disabilities and to understand the profound meaning of acquiring impairments through participation in conflict, as well as how post-conflict responses could enable these individuals to gain the skills they need to successfully reintegrate into their communities. 

Disability and the Global South, 2019, Vol.6, No. 2

Disability studies and the medical humanities have recently garnered increasing attention from academics interested in challenging modern, biological understandings of health and illness that dehumanize and alienate people with disabilities and those who are ill. While these discourses have much to contribute to the understanding of human diversity, including the study of race and ethnicity, the risk of conflating illness, disability, and historical forms of systemic discrimination remains a point of concern. As a black Martinican, clinician, and philosopher, Frantz Fanon draws our attention to the importance of healing the physical, affective, and epistemological wounds of coloniality by attending to the social relations that produce them. Fanon exposes the limits of hegemonic epistemologies of the body, raising the question of what other kinds of knowledge about health and illness are likewise excluded by the coloniality of knowledge. Theorizing the clinic as an important location from which revolutionary thought can emerge, I provide a decolonial framework for understanding how a sustained encounter between critical race and disability studies can generate new conceptions of health and healing that requires thinking about a different kind of pain and suffering not captured by the current rubric but to which we, in the twenty-first century, must nevertheless attend.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 1

Articles include:

• Editorial: Intersecting Indigeneity, colonialisation and disability
• Yuin, Kamilaroi, Sámi, and Maori people’s reflections on experiences as ‘Indigenous scholars’ in ‘Disability Studies’ and ‘Decolonisation’
• Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology: Practitioners’ Reflections on Indigeneity, Disability and Neo-Colonial Marketing
• ‘My granddaughter doesn’t know she has disabilities and we are not going to tell her’: Navigating Intersections of Indigenousness, Disability and Gender in Labrador
• Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism
• The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its implications for the health and wellbeing of indigenous peoples with disabilities: A comparison across Australia, Mexico and New Zealand
• Challenges in global Indigenous–Disability comparative research, or, why nation-state political histories matter
• ‘Black on the inside’: albino subjectivity in the African novel
• The role of indigenous and external knowledge in development interventions with disabled people in Burkina Faso: the implications of engaging with lived experiences
• An intersection in population control: welfare reform and indigenous people with a partial capacity to work in the Australian northern territory
• Inclusion of marginalised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples with neurocognitive disability in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)

The importance of online communities for parents of people with disabilities has been discussed by many scholars in the fields of Digital and Disability Studies, showing, for instance, the importance of social support and the formation of social ties. In order to contribute to this scholarship, this paper explores how collective identity models are built and circulated by parents of autistic people in one of the biggest Brazilian online communities about the subject, ‘Sou autista… conheça o meu mundo’ (I am autistic…get to know my world). The results were obtained through a digital ethnography, based on participant observation and an exchange of information with the members of the community studied. Based on the data collected, the study concludes that the collective identity models that circulate in this community can be grouped into legitimising, resistant, and project identities, as postulated by Castells (2010). The different views reflect how parents see autism and represent the ways it is treated in Brazilian society.

Disability and the Global South, 2018 Vol.5, No. 1

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

Globally, Indigenous people, also known as First Peoples, have the poorest health outcomes of all population groups, resulting in significantly higher rates of chronic disease, ill-health, and disability. Recent research strongly suggests that Australian First Peoples and the Sami peoples of the Nordic region are positioned at opposite ends of the disability–health spectrum. Australia’s First Peoples, now experience the highest rates of disability in the nation’s recorded history, despite the significant government investment over recent decades in national Indigenous policy. Yet, Nordic Indigenous populations appear to have similar health outcomes and living conditions as the rest of the population in the region. In this paper, we compare some of the global assumptions of the two leading countries of the United Nations Human Development Index– Norway (ranked first) and Australia (ranked second)– and examine the ways in which such rankings act to hide the disparities of life trajectories and outcomes for Indigenous persons living with disability compared to the rest of the population in each country. The findings of the comparative analysis illustrate core areas for consideration when undertaking in-depth comparative research with First Nation’s peoples. This includes issues surrounding the differentiated political significance of national population data systems for local Indigenous peoples in their struggles for recognition, and the nuanced processes of population data categorisation that are developed as a result of First Nation’s localised struggles for recognition, respect and rights under processes of European colonisation.

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

In Australia, in the last decade, there have been significant policy changes to income support payments for people with a disability and Indigenous people. These policy reforms intersect in the experience of Indigenous people with a partial capacity to work in the Northern Territory who are subject to compulsory income management if classified as long-term welfare payment recipients. This intersection is overlooked in existing research and government policy. In this article, we apply intersectionality and Southern disability theory as frameworks to analyse how Indigenous people with a partial capacity to work (PCW) in the Northern Territory are governed under compulsory income management. Whilst the program is theoretically race and ability neutral, in practice it targets specific categories of people because it fails to address the structural and cultural barriers experienced by Indigenous people with a disability and reinscribes disabling and colonising technologies of population control.

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