Decolonial Disability Studies and Overlapping Global Crises: Transcending Traditional Development Intervention and Epistemic Paradigms
Chair(s): Alexis Padilla (University of Missouri Saint Louis)
Responding to this year’s CASID conference theme of overlapping global crises, each of the panelists in this proposed roundtable tackles one of the three sub-themes as follows: (1) “Theoretical and empirical examinations of colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization,” (2) “International solidarities, liberation and abolition,” and (3) “Human rights abuses, gender inequality, racisms, and discrimination and marginalization according to social relations of oppression…” We do so by elevating intersectional decolonial disability studies as an alternative epistemic and intervention stance in connection to oppressive underdevelopment and (mis)representation issues impacting intersectional disability groups in global south contexts. Our innovative theoretical framing builds on two concomitant bodies of literature: the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), knowledge (Dussel, 1995), and being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) on the one hand, and critical disability studies (CDS) with an emphasis on alternative (Goodley et al., 2019) and intersectional (Obourn, 2020) explorations within global north contexts or, most significantly, explorations which target global (Erevelles, 2011) and global south/development concerns (Grech, 2015; Meyers, 2019) on the other. Our proposal stems from the limited attention given to disability matters in development studies, despite its status as the largest global minority whose future is closely entangled in most overlapping crises worldwide. Our analysis synthesizes themes and findings from curating a special issue on decolonial disability in the global south which will be published at the end of the spring through the Review of Disability Studies. Our cluster of essays demonstrate the need not only to give agency to impacted intersectional disability populations. Above all, these works stress the need to critically interrogate the innovative epistemic complexities highlighted whenever one seeks to undo the injustices and oppressive dimensions at the root of the extreme marginalization to which these groups are subjected.
Presentations of the Symposium
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Karen Soldatic1, Thuy Nguyen2, Shilpaa Annan3
1Toronto Metropolitan University, 2Carlton University, 3Telangana University