Comment from the Field: Disability and the Majority World: Challenging Dominant Epistemologies

Abstract

The one-day conference, held on 9 July 2010 at the Gaskell campus at Manchester Metropolitan University, successfully brought together academics, disability activists, researchers, and other stakeholders, to discuss and contribute to the often partial and fragmented debate around disability in the global South. More specifically, it sought to provide an open space for dialogue, and for the articulation and questioning of dominant epistemologies, to instead explore themes often bypassed, ignored, or rejected by Western disability studies; engaging alternative approaches to knowledge and its generation; challenging dominant epistemologies and exploring the possibilities of developing a Disability Studies that is both critical and global. My opening presentation, Intersections in Disability, Poverty and Development: A Global Disability Studies?, problematized some of the complexities in articulating a debate around disability, development, and poverty, highlighting how various gaps remain, bound to Western Disability Studies and epistemologies such as the social model, unequipped and even unwilling to engage with contextual, historical, economic, and many other critical aspects that differentiate the global South in its complex heterogeneity. I concluded that the exportation of Western epistemologies will not do, extending the call for a critical global Disability Studies that is interdisciplinary, open, questioning, and willing to learn and challenge ideas at its very core. Susan Buell from the University of East Anglia, in Social, Medical or Ch'alla?: The Poisoned Chalice of the Disability Professional, focused on people with a communication impairment in Bolivia to explore the experiences of families and the spaces where they find representation, support, and information. Buell, among other things, argued that the concept of the disability professional, within the Western social model context, continues to be enmeshed with that of the medical model in the exportation of knowledge. Overall, within dominant models of disability, specialist knowledge, she argued, is viewed as a poisoned chalice that is made so in practice by ignoring the value that skilled knowledge can contribute to breaking down barriers for families by providing support at the micro level, especially when professionals are willing to gain and share knowledge and to work with traditional systems. Alison Sheldon from the University of Leeds, in her presentation Locating Disability in the Majority World: Geography or Poverty?, adopted a materialist social model approach, and argued around/against the notion of a majority world as a separate space and a poverty within, as something different or separate from that in the West, drawing instead similarities between poverty in the global South and homeless people in the United Kingdom, stating that experiences of deprivation among other things are shared and operate on similar dynamics, and that in turn even open the spaces for relevance of Western theories. The next presentation, Rising to the Challenge of Inclusive Networking: Balancing Insider and Outsider Perspectives, by Susie Miles from the University of Manchester, introduced the Enabling Education Network (EENET), while reflecting on the meaning of inclusive education, highlighting the culturally determined nature of this concept. …