Disability in the Global South ― The Critical Handbook

This first-of-its kind volume spans the breadth of disability research and practice specifically focusing on the global South. Established and emerging scholars alongside advocates adopt a critical and interdisciplinary stance to probe, challenge and shift common held social understandings of disability in established discourses, epistemologies and practices, including those in prominent areas such as global health, disability studies and international development. Motivated by decolonizing approaches, contributors carefully weave the lived and embodied experiences of disabled people, families and communities through contextual, cultural, spatial, racial, economic, identity and geopolitical complexities and heterogeneities.

 

Dispatches from Ghana, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Venezuela among many others spotlight the complex uncertainties of modern geopolitics of coloniality; emergent forms of governance including neoliberal globalization, war and conflicts; the interstices of gender, race, ethnicity, space and religion; structural barriers to redistribution and realization of rights; and processes of disability representation. This handbook examines in rigorous depth, established practices and discourses in disability including those on development, rights, policies and practices, opening a space for critical debate on hegemonic and often unquestioned terrains.

 

Highlights of the coverage include:

 

• Critical issues in conceptualizing disability across cultures
  
• The challenges of disability statistics.
  
• Colonialism and disability
  
• Disability and poverty: critical renegotiations
  
• Livelihoods and disability: the complexities of labouring in the global South.
  
• Intersectional terrains, including migration, race, ethnicity, and customary embodiedness
  
• Disability and Religion
• Violence against disabled women in the global South: working locally, acting globally.
• Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction
  
• The UNCRPD and critical orientations towards disability rights within various contextual settings
  
• Redistribution systems including disability inclusive budgeting, social security regimes and social policy measures
  
• Global South–North partnerships: intercultural methodologies in disability research.
  

This much awaited handbook provides students, academics, practitioners and policymakers with an authoritative framework for critical thinking and debate about disability, while pushing theoretical and practical frontiers in unprecedented ways.

Dr Shaun Grech is Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University and Editor-in-chief of the international journal Disability and the Global South. His research covers disability and poverty in the Global South; colonialism and coloniality; decolonizing methodologies; intersectionalities; and interactions between theory and practice as a project of decolonizing pedagogy and praxis. He is also an activist and has extensive field level experience combining ethnographic work with practice projects with disabled people in extreme poverty (www.integrafoundation.org/Guatemala). Dr Karen Soldatic is xxx. She is an international leader in disability policy studies whose research builds upon her extensive policy experience working inside government on national disability policy priorities, undertaking major state programmatic reforms involving research, public consultation and program implementation (2002 – 2010), and working within development in Cambodia and Sri Lanka. She co-founded the Australian Sociological Association’s – Critical Disability Studies Thematic Group (2008).