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

Jiya Pandya is a scholar of transnational disability studies currently working on a concept history of "disability" in postcolonial Indian welfare as a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Their work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, History of Anthropology Review, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.

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

Calls to “decolonize” disability studies have proliferated in the last decade. Pointing to the scholarly overrepresentation of Europe and North America, academics and activists have pushed for research into new places and ways of thinking. But what does it mean to “decolonize” histories and approaches that are forged through the workings of empire? Arguing that the discourse around “decolonization” in the Global South – specifically, India – is currently analytically and politically insufficient, my work reshapes disability studies by calling for engagement with historical specificity, attention to the hybridity of concepts in the encounter between West and non-West, and an awareness of the ways decoloniality is being coopted in global politics. I do this by using multilingual archival and ethnographic research to historicize the fundamental concept of “disability” itself and to look for “accessibility” and “disability justice” where they go by other names.

My dissertation/first book, Broken Bodies, Handicapped Nation: Conceptualizing Disability, Welfare, and the Indian Nation-State, 1930-1995, shows how “disability” was produced as a contingent and flexible concept in the mid-twentieth century. During this period of decolonization, newly independent nations like India worked with transnational aid organizations for the welfare of those they defined as “disabled.” Both Indian and transnational actors leveraged this “disability welfare” work to garner moral authority for varied political projects. Chapters feature (i) the use of leprosy work to gain support for missionary conversion and a nationalist mass movement, (ii) mandatory physical education and yoga as methods to build an able-bodied, healthy, independent nation, (iii) the expansive development of rehabilitation and vocational therapy for the disabled as a means to promote “indigenous” Indian technologies and industries, and (iv) the declaration of 1981 as the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons to build goodwill for Western developmental aid and socio-economic liberalism. In addition to unpacking the top-down approach of developmental and humanitarian politics, I also examine how Indians with “non-normative” bodies – especially those categorized in Indian law as “socially handicapped” due to disadvantages of gender, class, and caste – navigated the flexible construction of “disability” to push for piecemeal inclusion in welfare projects. While these moral projects resulted in the incorporation of certain forms of disability and certain disabled people into transnational politics, they excluded many others from accessing disability identity and rights. Particularly now, at a time when India’s right-wing government is advertising its commitment to “disability welfare” and “decolonization” to back their dangerous and exclusionary policies, it is vital to push for a textured history of these concepts and the structures of power in which they are embroiled.

A key argument I make in this book is that the foundational concept of the “social model of disability,” which has shaped so much of our field and our activism, was actually inherently  transnational, intellectually relying on concepts from the “periphery” to shape the Western trajectory of disability studies. Vic Finkelstein of the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation or UPIAS, the group credited with coming up with the “social model of disability,” in fact borrowed language for their model from the Indian legal emphasis on “social handicap” and from South African anti-apartheid work. I can speak more to this later, but I want to reiterate that there is no disability studies without the complex entanglements of the Global North and South, and the categories scholars take as foundational werduring and after empire.e, in fact, shaped 

I have also brought the lens of disability justice to service work in the field and to advocacy work in South Asia. For the former, I am editing a special issue with two colleagues inaugurating the concept of “peripheral crip critique” which features scholarship exclusively about the Global South in the journal Disability Studies Quarterly. We are accepting academic articles, artistic pieces, and other forms of submissions on ways we can rethink crip theory and critique from the Global South by Feb 15th, and I encourage anyone here interested in applying at www.peripheralcripcritique.com. I have also been recently with the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), run by survivor groups from the aftermath of the catastrophic 1984 Bhopal Gas Leak. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the gas leak, and events have taken place around the United States and India to register the demands of survivors against Dow Chemicals, the company who owned the pesticide factory which leaked toxic MIC gas on the people of Bhopal, a small city in Madhya Pradesh, in India, and against the Indian government for their mismanagement of the legal case of survivors. If anyone here is interested in getting involved in that work, please write to me and we’d be thrilled to include you in future events and organizing.

My second book project builds on my political advocacy with ICJB by focusing on how Bhopali survivor activism speaks to “disability justice” without using that terminology. It provides a counter-genealogy of disability activism by focusing on alternative vocabularies of health, care, cure, and pain in social movements across the Global South. It takes as its starting point the understanding that disability identity and academic inquiry are fundamentally inaccessible to many by virtue of their class, caste, and geographical location. To meaningfully account for this exclusion, this project turns to movements that have not been considered part of struggles for “disability rights” or “disability justice” but work closely on questions of access, cure, care, and health. I put the theories emerging from the movement in Bhopal in conversation with those from environmental justice groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and East Asia, taking my cue from the survivor tour that Bhopalis did in the United States earlier this year building connections with frontline communities in Louisiana, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, to name a few. In my second project, I establish that an inclusive, intersectional, and “decolonial” disability framework is already being materially developed outside the ivory tower. Through the two books, special issue, and other service and advocacy in disability community, I hope to continue building an inclusive, rigorous, transnational, and politically engaged disability studies.