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Labeling albinism: language and discourse surrounding people with albinism in Tanzania

BROCCO, Giorgio
2015

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This article is based on a qualitative study that set out to analyze the labels and terms attached to 28 people affected by albinism in villages in Kilolo district, Tanzania. Even though national and international attention to killings of people with albinism has attempted to improve general knowledge of albinism and reduce discrimination, most of the community members within the study had lit- tle knowledge of the (bio)medical explanations for albinism and tended to marginalize people with albinism. Framed within a wider moral discourse on ill- ness, disability and socially appropriate behavior, albinism is mostly considered to be God’s will or the consequence of past misdeeds within the family, and many of the existing labels for people with albinism express such ideas.

Deaf identities in a multicultural setting: The Ugandan context

MUGEERE, Anthony B
ATEKYEREZA, Peter
KIRUMIRA, Edward K
HOJER, Staffan
2015

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Often located far apart from each other, deaf and hearing impaired persons face a multiplicity of challenges that evolve around isolation, neglect and the deprivation of essential social services that affect their welfare and survival. Although it is evident that the number of persons born with or acquire hearing impairments in later stages of their lives is increasing in many developing countries, there is limited research on this population. The main objective of this article is to explore the identities and experiences of living as a person who is deaf in Uganda. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 42 deaf persons (aged 19–41) and three focus group discussions, the study findings show that beneath the more pragmatic identities documented in the United States and European discourses there is a matrix of ambiguous, often competing and manifold forms in Uganda that are not necessarily based on the deaf and deaf constructions. The results further show that the country’s cultural, religious and ethnic diversity is more of a restraint than an enabler to the aspirations of the deaf community. The study concludes that researchers and policy makers need to be cognisant of the unique issues underlying deaf epistemologies whilst implementing policy and programme initiatives that directly affect them. The upper case ‘D’ in the term deaf is a convention that has been used since the early 1970s to connote a ‘socially constructed visual culture’ or a linguistic, social and cultural minority group who use sign language as primary means of communication and identify with the deaf community, whereas the lower case ‘d’ in deaf refers to ‘the audio logical condition of hearing impairment’. However, in this article the lower case has been used consistently.

Disability under occupation : at the congruence between conflict, religion, & society in Palestine

RASHID, Omar
January 2015

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A dissertation on the Palestinian experience of disability under Israeli territorial occupation. The following key research questions were considered under this dissertation. "First, to locate the perceptions of disability among the disabled in the occupied territories of Palestine, in light of their religious affiliation. Second, to investigate the realities of the disabled within Palestine; and third, to enquire as to whether there had been any differences in the perceptions of disabilities and the realities of those who were injured in conflict, and those who were born with impairment" These questions were answered through a hybrid-methods system of research, with a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods being used

 

Dissertation submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for a Masters degree at the University of Birmingham

The user has given permission for the original dissertation document to be uploaded to be reproduced and made publicly available on the Source website

Revolutionary entanglements: Transversal mappings of disability in the favela

NASCIMENTO, Ashley Do
SKOTT-MYHRE, Hans A
SKOTT-MYHRE, Kathleen S G
2015

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This paper examines, complicates and contests the implicit discourse of children living in poverty as inherently disabled. Challenging the media portrayal of young people living in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro within the neo-liberal discourse of development, the article will draw on the experience of one of the author’s (Ashley Do Nascimento) experience as a child and youth care worker and ethnographer in a favela in Rio. An argument will be made for re-thinking dis-ability in relation to poverty and childhood in the global south.

 

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

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Disability: A critical study of an invisibilized constituency in India

VAIDYA, Shruti
2015

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This paper explores childhood sexual abuse as understood by disabled individuals from their particular locations. The paper reports on qualitative research with disabled adults identifying themselves as survivors/victims of childhood sexual abuse. In the Indian context, Childhood sexual abuse has been understood in a monolithic way, erasing all differences that exist among children from different social locations. The paper attempts to provide an alternative perspective by focusing on the specificities of the experiences of disabled persons. The textual sources examined in the paper investigate the concept of childhood, disability and sexuality and their interconnections, both in the Western and the Indian context. Discourses that construct children as passive and ignorant make it important to provide narratives which capture strategies of resistance within power structures which constrain choices. This paper makes an attempt to document and analyze the experiences of disabled individuals who have undergone childhood sexual abuse within the larger context of Indian laws, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which engage with the concept and reportage and which represent dominant views on Childhood sexual abuse and disabilities.

 

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

Beneath the rhetoric: Policy to reduce the mental health treatment gap in Africa

COOPER, Sara
2015

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In this paper I problematize knowledge on reducing the ‘gap’ in treatment produced by 14 national mental health policies in Africa. To contextualize this analysis, I begin with a historic-political account of the emergence of the notion of primary health care and its entanglement within decolonization forces of the 1960s. I unpack how and why this concept was subsequently atrophied, being stripped of its more revolutionary sentiments from the 1980s. Against this backdrop, I show how, although the 14 national mental health policies are saturated with the rhetoric of primary health care and associated concepts of community participation and ownership, in practice they tend to marginalize local meaning-systems and endorse a top-down framework heavily informed by colonial medicine. The policies thus end up reproducing many of the very Eurocentric assumptions that the original primary health care notion sought to transcend. More specifically, the paradigms of evidence-based research/practice and individualised human rights become the gatekeepers of knowledge. These two paradigms, which are deeply embedded within contemporary global mental health discourse, are legislating what are legitimate forms of knowing, and by extension, valid forms of care. I argue that a greater appreciation of the primary health care concept, in its earliest formulation, offers a potentially fruitful terrain of engagement for developing more contextually-embedded and epistemologically appropriate mental health policies in Africa. This in turn might help reduce the current ‘gap’ in mental health care treatment so many countries on the continent face.

 

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

Working within the tensions of disability and education in post-colonial Kenya: Toward a praxis of critical disability studies

ELDER, Brent C
FOLEY, Alan
2015

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This paper explores emerging and evolving critical approaches to inclusive education development work in the postcolonial, global South context of Kenya. Taking an ontoformative (Connell, 2011) perspective of disability, we view disability as a dynamic process inherently tied to social contexts and their fluid effects on disabled bodies. Thus, not all impairments are a natural form of human diversity, and many are imposed on bodies in underdeveloped countries through oppressive imported Western practices. In this paper we present our work not as models of ‘what to do’ or ‘what not to do’ in development work. Rather we offer a reflection on the evolution of our understanding and approach to this work from being merely ‘progressive’ (while further exporting Northern theory), toward a more critical and self-reflexive approach. We hope this is a starting point in a dialogical process of mutual knowledge production between the global North and South that leads to better ways of conceptualizing and supporting people with disabilities in the global South.

 

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

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