Perspectives in Disability Studies
Section outline
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As the field of disability studies developed, pressing critiques directed at the whiteness and Euro-centric/Western-centric nature of its canon, have productively steered disability theory towards engagement with political economy of global capitalism and legacies of colonialism. This class reimagines disability (and disability analyses) by accounting for what Helen Meekosha, an Australian feminist disability scholar, dubbed as “scholarly colonialism”; a process of knowledge-building in which social and material realities of many disabled and crip lives out of the global North (and even within the global North) remain under-theorized. Deconstructing the legacies of western modernity and the ways in which contemporary models of disability are implicated in global hegemonies, we will engage with theorisations of the post-colonial, post-socalist and neo-colonial forms of exploitations of the “southern disabled bodies” (Connell) and examine the positionalities and politics of the “post-socialist crip”. Further, we will explore how differently could be the category of disability articulated and used in understanding the intersections with various forms of contemporary racialisation and ethnicising, gender and sexuality.
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