240129 SE VM3 / VM8 - ‘The world’s largest minority’ (2020W)

Human rights debates have by now become mainstreamed instruments in international policy discourses, subject to fairly little questioning in public and political debate. Yet issues around the production and effects of ‘dis/ability’– a very broad, permeable and impermanent category – in the Majority World (Global South) are largely neglected in human rights debates and only slowly gaining discursive traction. International development is among the disciplines that are shedding light on the imbalance of rights and human rights’ peripheries.
This course introduces students to how fundamental rights have been furthered by efforts of social movements around the globe, and which theoretical streams hold epistemic power in this area of knowledge. Considering the lives and voices of persons with disabilities – estimated by the WHO to range from 10 to 20% of the world’s population – sensitises development researchers about the contingency of categories they use, their impermanence and permeability.
In this seminar, we first inspect the institutional category of ‘dis/ability’ (including dis/ableism as discriminatory practices), the geopolitics and genesis of modern human rights. Second, origins of social norms and institutional normalisation will be questioned light of a neoliberal logic and its immanent social constructions. Third, and most importantly, responses from non-dominant geographies of knowledge are to be critically inspected for the light they shine on injustice between who experiences disabling conditions, how a Global North plays part in their causation until this day, and where opportunities of reading dis/ability from the margins emerge.
Students are to critically engage with the knowledge they have already gathered. A Critical Disability Studies perspectives allows us to recognise ‘dismodernist’ (Davis 2002) perspectives on shared difference, institutional authority, socio-economic dependencies that follow corporeal and psychological differences, as well as inequalities in the “production” of dis/ability due to (neo)colonial practices, such as armed conflict, environmental pollution and migration control. Our goal is to recognise where human rights-sensitive strategies provide ground for the visibility of various vulnerabilities and needs, while at the same time veiling the geopolitical contexts in which dis/ability occurs. Development strategies are shown to have co-opted many aspects of global dis/ability discourses. Now they require constant inspection, to see how this critique of inequality and invisibility, coming in large parts from the Global South, shows effects in development programmes’ scope and promotes heightened sensitivity for extant inequalities.

Methods:
Critical reading and preparation of questions in small focus groups (group reading and mutual presentation - group size dependent on number of participants);
Peer review and plenary discussion during each session;
group presentations on literature – with questions prepared to guide the discussion.
Relevant texts shall allow students an overview of research perspectives available to them, and which they can later use as a prism through which to regard policy strategies.
In the shadow of recent developments in global health and the home-learning measures that followed, this course will put specific attention on participants using technical tools available to them to produce contents in accessible format.

Aims:
Participants will be able to
a. understand dis/ability as a vantage point from which to critique oversights in human rights and inequality discourses;
b. apply methodological sensitivity where cumulatively disadvantaged/vulnerable social actors, in their diverse geopolitical settings and relationships of knowledge, take positions towards policy frameworks across the globe;
c. find practical examples of where rights efforts raise attention to diverse groups’ methods for joint action.