Inclusive Development as Crip(dys)topic Promise: Querying Development, Dis/ability and Human Rights

Abstract

Western representations of the Southern disabled subject are shaped by discourses of Inclusive Development that simultaneously produce the conditions of the subject's visibility and intelligibility. The article traces these conditions through crip readings of historical and contemporary discourses and visual representations that outline the extent to which disability has always already been a crucial part of modern development rhetoric. The article asks if and how, Inclusive Development leads to a querying of ableist norms and processes of exclusion within practices and discourses of ‘development’. Analysing the hegemonic forms of disability and development knowledge produced within the textual and visual discourses on Inclusive Development the author foregrounds the ways in which ableist and colonial dichotomies are re-installed within the epistemologies of Inclusive Development. The article argues that the promises of justice and inclusion produced within development discourse point to a crip(dys)topic future that is always already out of place, thus effectively excluding inclusion.