"Disability Studies," The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 25 (Oxford University Press, 2017): 211-230. [doi: 10.1093/ywcct/mbx011]. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015
In this article, I review seven books published in disability studies in 2013 and 2014. Two of the books deal exclusively with the North American context. The remaining five books focus primarily on areas outside North America, including Europe, Asia and Latin America. Two of the books are edited anthologies of new and original work. Four books are single-authored monographs and one book is co-authored. A search of new work published in 2013 and 2014 revealed more than twenty books. As a way of narrowing the focus and organizing the essay, I begin with a critique of key issues raised in Lennard J. Davis’ The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (UMichiganP [2013]) and go on to show how authors living and/or working in other parts of the world are engaging with, building on and diverging from what could be called a white, Western global North disability studies. In the end, I argue that decentring North American and UK disability studies reveals significant field-changing insights that will no doubt have profound and lasting effects on the study of disability and disabled people in the humanities and social sciences.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural , 2016
In last year’s article [2015] in this same journal, I discussed various theorizations of ‘normal’, ‘normality’, and more specifically, Lennard Davis’ assertion that we are witnessing the ‘end of normal’. Ideas about normality have formed a core concept upon which disability studies work has been built for decades. The authors I consider in this review article take on an equally important and no less capacious or fraught concept: citizenship. Or as Hirschmann and Linker, and their authors (Civil Disabilities, reviewed below) think of it: citizenship, membership, and belonging. In an effort to follow my own advice and decentre scholarship emerging out of the global North, I will begin the review in Guatemala with Shaun Grech’s innovative and powerful Disability and Poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating Development in Guatemala.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015
Print Version: In this article, I review seven books published in disability studies in 2013 and 2014. Two of the books deal exclusively with the North American context. The remaining five books focus primarily on areas outside North America, including Europe, Asia and Latin America. Two of the books are edited anthologies of new and original work. Four books are single-authored monographs and one book is co-authored. A search of new work published in 2013 and 2014 revealed more than twenty books.
Disability and social justice (Disability & Society, 2016)
This article explores the significance of disability for social justice, using Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice as a guideline. The article argues that the disability perspective is essential for understanding and promoting social justice, although it is often disregarded by critical thinkers and social activists. The article looks at three prominent strategies for achieving social justice under conditions of capitalism: economically, by decommodifying labour; culturally, by deconstructing self-sufficiency; and politically, by transnationalising democracy. The disability perspective reveals that decommodification of labour requires enhancement of disability support, deconstruction of self-sufficiency requires valorisation of disability-illuminated interdependence, and transnationalisation of democracy requires scrutiny of the transnational production of impairments. The article discusses each of these strategies in theoretical and practical terms by drawing on disability studies and Fraser’s analyses.
Grech, S. and Soldatic, K. Introducing Disability and the Global South (DGS): we are critical, we are open access! Disability and the Global South, 1(1), 1-4
Disentangling critical disability studies
Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging insights, including theorizing through materialism, bodies that matter, inter/trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and Other. I briefly disentangle these themes and suggest that while we may well start with disability, we often never end with it as we engage with other transformative arenas including feminist, critical race and queer theories. Yet critical disability studies reminds us of the centrality of disability when we consider the politics of life itself. In this sense, then, disability becomes entangled with other forms of oppression and revolutionary responses.
Philosophy and Medicine, 2009
This article explores the significance of disability for social justice, using Nancy Fraser's theory of justice as a guideline. The article argues that the disability perspective is essential for understanding and promoting social justice, although it is often disregarded by critical thinkers and social activists. The article looks at three prominent strategies for achieving social justice under conditions of capitalism: economically, by decommodifying labour; culturally, by deconstructing self-sufficiency; and politically, by transnationalising democracy. The disability perspective reveals that decommodification of labour requires enhancement of disability support, deconstruction of self-sufficiency requires valorisation of disability-illuminated interdependence, and transnationalisation of democracy requires scrutiny of the transnational production of impairments. The article discusses each of these strategies in theoretical and practical terms by drawing on disability studies and Fraser's analyses. Points of interest • This article looks at social justice from the perspective of disability. • The article argues that a society is just only when it provides accessible and adequate disability support. • The article also argues that a society is just only when it does not stigmatise disabled people's 'dependency' but recognises that everyone is interdependent. • Finally, the article argues that a society is just only when it is possible for people impaired by global economy and violence to have a say in the policies that have affected them.
The words 'colonised' and 'colonising' have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other 'decolonisation' is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and livedneocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.