Ankita Mishra -  How does your area of research engage with disability in the geopolitical south and challenge dominant epistemologies and paradigms of disability?  

Ankita Mishra, PhD, is the Research Associate: Health Priorities for Disability Matters at The University of Sheffield. Her research, teaching and scholar activism is interdisciplinary using participatory and creative approaches in her work with marginalised communities affected by intersectional oppression. She draws upon critical community psychology, Black feminism, critical race theory, critical disability studies and decolonial theory in her research and practice.

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia page.

 I would like to start by saying that my understanding and use of north/south in this context is geopolitical, socioeconomic rather than geographical. I also acknowledge the limitations of these terms risk homogenisation of countries and regions, when that is not really the case.

Marginality is much more than a site of deprivation; it is also the site of radical openness and possibility, a space of resistance.
- bell hooks

In her essay Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks (1989) conceptualises the margin as a ‘profound edge’ that helps develop a particular understanding of the centre as well as the periphery, providing a sense of both the outside in and the inside out, fostering possibilities of radical perspectives and ways of knowing unknown to those not on the margins. In disability studies scholarship, despite ongoing discourses on decolonisation and de-ableism, Euro-American, Western, whitestream knowledge, practices, and institutions continue to exercise control over what counts as knowledge, how it is produced and by whom, through legitimising specific ways of knowing (Castro-Gómez, 2002; Mbembe, 2016), marginalising geopolitical South knowledge(s) and praxis. This hegemonic universalisation of the geopolitical North paradigms, epistemologies, theories, and methodologies asserts and maintains the ‘coloniality of power’ in the global context of research and knowledge production.

In line with hooks (1989), I distinguish between this type of marginality that is imposed by oppressive structures and the marginality that is chosen as a site of resistance. I contend that disability studies scholarship needs to engage with the marginality of the geopolitical South knowledge(s), ways of knowing, and understanding as a radical point of resistance to challenge the monoculture of Eurocentric disability studies and rational-cognitive ways of scientific knowledge. Here, the margin becomes the centre; the starting point from which to reimagine alternative worlds and possibilities in and of disability.

For disability studies scholarship, immersing in this radical space can be simultaneously:

• Disruptive, as it can unsettle hegemonic structures of knowledge or taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being embedded within Western whitestream disability studies (Santos, 2018);
• Generative, as it enables considering alternative ways of knowing through written, verbal, visual, affective, embodied, experiential, mental, intuitive, artistic, spiritual, and multiplicity of oppositional knowledge(s) to domination (Collins, 2002);
• Collective, as it seeks working with, from, and across the knowledge(s), experiences, and wisdom of disabled people in the geopolitical South (Nguyen, 2023);
• Recuperative, as it focuses on ethical principles that acknowledge relational accountability, care, communality of knowledge, interdependence, and benefit sharing (Chilisa, 2012; Wilson and Wilson, 2013).

As we reorient the periphery by engaging with the marginality of disability in the geopolitical South as a site of resistance, I propose that the conventional binary framing of ‘the global/geopolitical North as the “giver” and the global/geopolitical South as the “receiver”’ (Chataika, 2012: 262) can be disrupted. This further creates the possibility of expanding the scope for new relational epistemologies and paradigms of disability in the North to embrace traditionally excluded domains such as emotions, embodied practice, love, ancestral wisdom, spirituality, and the like (Castro-Gómez, 2002). This reciprocal engagement, as Spivak (2016) suggests, ‘confuses the distinctions’ between North and South, making the South visible in the North.

Connell (2019) describes this process as “cross-fertilisation” and “transculturalization” of knowledge(s) in transnational contexts. As such, our pan-national programme Disability Matters—with disability as the driving subject of inquiry—provides us with these possibilities. In my role exploring the health priorities of disabled people in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, I turn to centre India with the aim of reorienting the periphery and disrupting hegemonic paradigms of disability.

Owing to the tremendous diversity of the country, disability in India needs to be positioned within multiple contexts, or more precisely, in the ‘many Indias’ that exist. This multiplicity complicates attempts to apply universalised frameworks from the Global North, which often fail to account for the specific socio-historical conditions, the realities of colonisation, caste, poverty, religion, region, gender, sexuality, and the impact of the hybridised nature of culture, economics, and politics on the lived realities of disabled people (Ghai, 2006; Mehrotra, 2020). It is also crucial to interrogate the use of Eurocentric concepts in understanding disabled people’s health(care), dependency, healing, cure, and rehabilitation in the socio-political-cultural and religious-spiritual milieu of India, making their uncritical application both epistemologically and methodologically inappropriate.

Centring the diverse and multifaceted realities of the many "Indias" is immense and deeply layered, resulting in a multiplicity of meaning(s), knowledge(s), and understanding(s) of disability and disabled identities, something that is nearly inconceivable within most Global North contexts. Through the ‘many Indias’, it reminds us of the nuances, complexities, pluralities, and multivocalities of doing disability and being disabled, and how disability is understood and experienced in these contexts is historical, cultural, political, and social. This radical space of the margin denounces the binary understanding of nature and reason, body and mind, rejecting the ahistorical classification of bodies through the scientific canon of knowledge production independent of context (Connell, 2011). Moreover, the lens of ‘connected selves’ in the Indian context (Das and Addlakha, 2001) positions inclusiveness at the core of humanity and highlights the significance of family and community support, particularly in the absence of state support. Thus, engaging with connectedness challenges the myth of ‘western independence’ and autonomy and offers possibilities to reimagine care, kinship, and community through the existence and co-existence of disability.

Taken together, an engagement with disability as the driving force of legitimate knowledge, the multiplicity of narratives of disabled people in disability and health research scholarship in India, and valuing diverse ways of knowing suggests the necessity of participatory research. Participatory research is a collaborative form of inquiry that centres the commitment to ‘no research on us without us’, originally advocated for by South Africans and Maoris in New Zealand and later adapted as the primary value of the disability justice movement (Fine et al., 2021). The origins of participatory research and its development draw inspiration from several thinkers and practitioners in the geopolitical South and have been adopted worldwide. By thinking through geopolitical South disabled ways of being as valuable and viable, we aim to de-hegemonise accounts of ability and disability in transnational contexts. Practicing where I am from and not where I am at gives me the inherent power in refusal for taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being. Following Grech (2021: 138), I refuse the generalisation and simplification of disability and the geopolitical south(s); I refuse the notion of vulnerability and fading agency attributed to disability and the geopolitical South; I refuse the imperative for intervening or exporting from the west to the other(s). Our endeavour in Disability Matters insists that the margin is not merely a site of deprivation but a transformative space of possibility. If disability studies fails to embrace these generative margins, it risks replicating the very systems of exclusion it seeks to dismantle.

References

Castro-Gómez, S., (2002) ‘The social sciences, epistemic violence, and the problem of the “invention of the other”’, Nepantla: Views from South, 3(2), pp. 269–285.

Chataika, T., (2012) ‘Disability, development and postcolonialism’, in Goodley, D., Hughes, B. and Davis, L. (eds.) Disability and social theory: New developments and directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 252–265.

Chilisa, B., (2012) Indigenous research methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Collins, P. H., (2002) Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.

Connell, R., (2011) ‘Southern bodies and disability: Re-thinking concepts’, Third World Quarterly, 32(8), pp. 1369–1381.

Connell, R., (2019) The good university: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change. London: Zed Books.

Das, V. and Addlakha, R., (2001) ‘Disability and domestic citizenship: Voice, gender, and the making of the subject’, Public Culture, 13(3), pp. 511–531.

Fine, M., Torre, M. E., Oswald, A. G. and Avory, S., (2021) ‘Critical participatory action research: Methods and praxis for intersectional knowledge production’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 68(3), pp. 344–358.

Ghai, A., (2006) (Dis)embodied form: Issues of disabled women. Delhi: Shakti Books.

hooks, b., (1989) ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, pp. 15–23.

Mbembe, A. J., (2016) ‘Decolonizing the university: New directions’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), pp. 29–45.

Mehrotra, N., (2020) Disability studies in India: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Singapore: Springer.

Nguyen, X. T., (2023) ‘Towards a decolonial approach to disability as knowledge and praxis: Unsettling the “colonial” and re-imagining research as spaces of struggles’, in Arvin, M., Murakami, W. and Figueroa, M. (eds.) Intersectional colonialities: Ethnic and indigenous studies in the new millennium. London: Routledge, pp. 233–251.

Santos, B. de S., (2018) The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of the epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Spivak, G., (2016) ‘Interview for the seminar “The veils of violence: Reflections and ethnic and gender experiences in Chile and Latin America”’, Cátedra Indígena, UChile Indígena, the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_OX2y4vuMs (Accessed: November 07 2024).

Wilson, S. and Wilson, A., (2013) ‘Neo way in ik issi: A family practice of Indigenist research informed by land’, in Mertens, D., Cram, F. and Chilisa, B. (eds.) Indigenous pathways into social research: Voices of a new generation. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 333–352.