Critical Disability Studies: contesting ‘development’ in the global South

Shaun Grech (he/him), Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Cape Town

Bio: Shaun Grech is Senior Academic Consultant in Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction (DIDRR) with Christian Blind Mission (CBM); Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Cape Town; and Affiliate Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Malta. He is also Editor in Chief of the International Journal Disability and the Global South.

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

For the past 20 or so years, I have been researching the space between disability, poverty, development and more recently humanitarian action as an academic and a consultant. Through that, came the inevitable encounter with decolonial studies as (like a few others) I questioned the problematic space that is the development sector (Escobar, 1995), the coloniality of knowledge and power (Quijano, 2000), the insensitive, unresponsive and disabling interventions that perpetually reframe an Other in need of some or other ‘illuminated’ intervention… a Southern subject that it seems, remains inept, incapable of survival, wrapped in a colonial lexicon of lack, maintaining deep geopolitical and historical asymmetries (Grech, 2015). 

Over the past years, I have been working more closely with International NGOs in research and at the fringes of academia looking at disaster risk reduction and humanitarian action more closely and how persons with disabilities are positioned, framed, forgotten… left to die, including by these same organisations paying me to presumably help them understand what is not working and what they can do better (see Grech, 2023). But many organisations are not very good at change, especially one that challenges fixities in their own thinking and practices. Maintaining the status quo and organising complex life in yet another logframe by an unknowing technical ‘expert’ in a distant European office is the way to go. Asking for more to be done and differently becomes idealistic, probe any further and the binary card is pulled out- ‘you are an academic… practice is different and you cannot dilute things enough for practitioners on the ground’.   

Like much of my academic work and life, a lot has been accidental, and so was my encounter with Critical Disability Studies, which I came to via development studies. But I really am no expert in anything, CDS included. Critical Disability Studies has provided me with a language to question the various margins, intersections, constructions and power in sectors and areas (disability and development; and disability inclusive disaster risk reduction and humanitarian action) that are often hardly theoretical and where difficult questions are perceived to be problematic, stall the flow, go against strategy, or are a plain nuisance. CDS, more than anything, has provided me with a positioning, transdisciplinary at its core, with porous borders, to be able to articulate the multiple problems that I see in my work as I traverse the uncomfortable space of academia and practice to understand disability in its complexity and heterogeneity in very poor spaces in the global from the margins. But more than anything, CDS gave me a phantom ‘field’ under which to ask my naughty questions. That I come from CDS, somehow gave me a ‘free pass’ to blurt them out in workshops, meetings, conferences, in organisational premises. Issues of power, representation, disablism (in our practices and in the name of ‘development’), identity and identification (who speaks for who and can they?), disability as historical and political, the ableism within a neoliberal development premised on able-bodiedness, a development evidently not for every body (Grech, 2011, 2021) (see also Nguyen, 2018 and Bezzina, 2020). In particular, it provided me with a very important space to critique and challenge some basic tenets of more ‘fundamentalist’ segments of disability studies and related concepts developed in the global North as these travelled across space and place, seeking to simplify, contain, generalize, homogenize and export the disability experience everywhere (see Grech, 2009, 2015a). While these concepts may be important political tools, their exportation does little to shift their hegemonic force, the colonial baggage that frames and legitimises them as superior ‘knowledge’, and the epistemic violence that ensues when concepts and much theory from the global South is hardly ever read (see Alatas, 2003; Collyer and Dufoix, 2022). I am still to see a global South disability studies and theory consumed and becoming legitimate everywhere, without authors having to qualify and explain the countries they write from. CDS to me is about (self)reflection, including on our own simplifications as we seek some or other escape from epistemic violence too…the tentative remedying often imbued with the same traps. This perhaps includes emerging decolonial perspectives in disability, which to me, have been stuck in an impasse for a while now…will merely complaining that disability discourse and theory is co-opted by the global North for the 1000^th time cut it? Will calling for global South academics only to speak about the global South, genuinely ‘decolonize’ discourse? Do academics in urban spaces of privilege in the global South always know what is happening in the impoverished rural areas of their own country or continent, let alone a geopolitical space filled with complex historicity? Do we need to look at a collaborative process of knowledge generation, to move towards levelled and inclusive epistemic and practice justice and alliances? Do we run the risk of disqualifying thinking on the basis of identity and locational politics? Is there anything to learn and draw from spaces of privilege too? Can/should we move beyond this limited ‘insider-outsider’ binary? (see Dror, 2022). Importantly, how can critical research reflect, disrupt and act? 

Thanks to CDS, I have employed theory from many places, from my roots in rural development and agricultural economics to psychology, sociology and Latin American decolonial studies, because in truth I am still confused, even after all these years. Perhaps, what CDS has contributed most to my research, theory and scholarship is comfort with not knowing, where this not knowing may also be productive, perpetually going back to the drawing board and raising more questions. For me, it has been a process of trying to understand what life is like in rural poverty, in different spaces and places, precarious livelihoods in informal economies, living with no social protection, the agricultural cycle, drought, the fictitious $2 a day construct, the impossibilities of accessing health care... days lived in dramatic pain, pain that is talked about but drowned out by urban DPOs; where individual rights may have little to no currency in close knit communities and where policies are often not worth the paper they are written on…can they eat ‘rights’? It has been about trying to understand the (im)possibilities of living life on the brink of survival every single day…in uncertainty and through disasters, only with and through agentic disabled families and to look at the spaces for change, including in contradictions, to embrace what Anzaldua (1987) would call multiplicity, including of subjectivities. My area of research and my thinking have been transformed not so much by the theoretical developments of CDS per se or by theory, but instead by the belief that life is really shit for many disabled people in such contexts, that we need to, we MUST do better, and how asking difficult questions, uncomfortable questions, is a necessary and mere start, but never an end.  

References

Alatas, S.F. (2003). Academic Dependency and the Global Division of Labour in the Social Sciences. Current Sociology, 51 (6), p. 599-613.

Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd Ed. San Francisco: Aut Lute Books

Bezzina, L. (2020) Disability and Development in Burkina Faso: Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave

Collyer, F. and Dufoix, S. (2022) Rethinking the Epistemic Compass. Revue D'histoire des Sciences Humaines, 41, 41.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Grech, S. (2011). Recolonising debates or perpetuated coloniality? Decentring the spaces of disability, development and community in the global South. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15(1), 87-100.

Grech, S. (2015) Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: Why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 21(1), 6-21.

Grech, S. (2015). Disability and Poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating Development in Guatemala. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Grech, S. (2021). Critical thinking on disability and development in the global South. In Brown, R., Maroto, M. and Pettinicchio (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Disability. New York: Oxford University Press.  

Grech, S. (2023) Mainstreaming Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction in Community Based Inclusive Development: A Situation Analysis. Germany: CBM and University of Cape Town. 

Dror, L. (2022) Is there an epistemic advantage to being oppressed? Noûs, 57(3), 618-640

Nguyen, X.T. (2018) Critical disability studies at the edge of global development: Why do we need to engage with Southern theory? Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 7(1), 1-25.

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla, 1(3), 533-580.