Whose Knowledge, Whose Voice? Power, Agency and Resistance in Disability Studies for the Global South
Meekosha (2011) maintains that research and theories about disability derive mainly from the global North. Disability studies rarely include non-metropolitan thinkers. Even when it does, this research tends to be seen as context specific, and the social t
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Whose Knowledge, Whose Voice? Power, Agency and Resistance in Disability Studies for the Global South JosAnn Cutajar and Casimir Adjoe
Introduction Meekosha (2011) maintains that research and theories about disability derive mainly from the global North. Disability studies rarely include non-metropolitan thinkers. Even when it does, this research tends to be seen as context specific, and the social theories which emanate from these studies are rarely referred to in research theorizing disability in the North. This chapter sets out to investigate how this one-way transfer of knowledge affects the way disability studies is conceptualized—whose experiences are incorporated and whose are left out. Multilateral debate and dialogue between disability studies academics and activists in different locations around the world would help add to the knowledge already available in the field, while keeping others informed about what is taking place in ‘similar’ situations elsewhere. Groce et al. (2011: 1493) maintain that most countries depend on North-derived concepts to differentiate between the ‘normal’ and those who are not. They also borrow and impose models from these locations to treat ‘the disabled’ (Grech 2011). The implication of this one-way transfer of knowledge, services, professionals, policies and ideas from North to South is that disability study students, academics, policy makers and activists may be ‘enabled’ but at the same time be constrained or ‘disabled’ by the global North-derived epistemology that informs perceptions, and
J. Cutajar (*) University of Malta, Msida, Malta e-mail: [email protected] C. Adjoe Central University College, Tema, Ghana © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grech, K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the Global South, International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_32
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hence their studies, research, policies and activism. As Jamaica Kincaid (cited by Chiseri-Strater and Stone Sunstein 1997) underlines, academics writing from the periphery but immersed in western produced knowledge tend to be familiar with the lay of the land in the West. This might render them ‘blind’ to the fact that the theories, policies and practices they consume and promote from the global North will not always enable them to explicate and address disability in the socio-economic, cultural and political context in which they are located. This chapter sets out to address this one-way transfer of knowledge between North and South, West and the rest and to delineate which analytical issues need to be incorporated in a disability studies for the global South. We will use Ghana and Malta as fluid case studies. We argue that theories from the global North do not always take into consideration the fact that the causes and redress of impairment lie beyond the capacity of the nation state. At the same time we need to explore the fact that the epistemologies and enunciative codes1 ‘borrowed’ from the North
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