Labouring Self-Help: Dialectics of Disability and Development in South India

Abstract

Neoliberal ideologies have been globalized through development practices, and these have tended to be received as seductive, even quasi-magical solutions for all. Offering an ethnographic window into what happens when these development policies are implemented for disabled members of rural communities in contemporary India, this paper captures disabled people's experiences as they move through the circuits of neoliberal development projects of the World Bank in rural areas of South India. Based on a multi-year ethnographic study of a disability self-help group project, it analyzes various material and discursive mechanisms by which groups get comported as self-government techniques that are limiting the scope of the state. Simultaneously, it captures ways in which disabled people manage to subvert millennial development and its assemblages to create emancipatory possibilities. A disability analytic reveals fissures in the implicit promises of development—its temporalities, spatialities, socialities, and embodied capacities – and critiques its foundational assumptions through the social worlds of those at its margins.