Disability Studies

In last year’s article in this same journal, I discussed various theorizations of ‘normal’, ‘normality’, and more specifically, Lennard Davis’ assertion that we are witnessing the ‘end of normal’. Ideas about normality have formed a core concept upon which disability studies work has been built for decades. The authors I consider in this review article take on an equally important and no less capacious or fraught concept: citizenship. Or as Hirschmann and Linker, and their authors ( Civil Disabilities , reviewed below) think of it: citizenship, membership, and belonging. In an effort to follow my own advice and decentre scholarship emerging out of the global North, I will begin the review in Guatemala with Shaun Grech’s innovative and powerful Disability and Poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating Development in Guatemala . Shaun Grech, Director of The Critical Institute, Malta, Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and editor-in-chief of the international journal Disability and the Global South , has given us a thoughtful, carefully executed study of the many relationships among disability and poverty in the lives of Guatemala’s indigenous rural population. Disability and Poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating Development in Guatemala , is written primarily as a critical intervention in the development fields following Grech's ongoing eleven-year qualitative research in a small emergency healthcare programme (that he co-runs in partnership with local disabled people’s organizations) in Guatemala (p. 23). Grech contends that disability ‘barely features’ in mainstream development studies (p. 8). ‘Disability and the realities of disabled people,’ he argues, ‘are repositioned as something separate from or outside the realm and theorization of poverty and standard “development” issues, including food security, livelihoods and conflict’ (p. 9). According to Grech, the literature that does directly address disability and development, ‘lacks interdisciplinarity’, ‘is scarcely theoretical’, and ‘is too often uncritical’ (p. 18). In one of his more frank and incisive (but equally thoughtful and deliberate) moments Grech declares that: ‘Criticality appears to be interpreted as “being problematic”’ (p. 19) in development studies, where the ‘objective is to get funding and churn out reports demanded by funders’ (p. 19). Criticality is, Gretch asserts, ‘perceived by some parties as a waste of time and money, but it is also uncomfortable when it pops the bubble of comfort, simplification and possibly self-righteousness’ (p. 19). Grech’s book aims to correct the apparent lack of theorization and criticality in development studies literature.

Citizenship · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Population · Poverty · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Human Rights and Development · Law

• Civil Disabilities

  Nancy J Hirschmann, Beth Linker•Civil Disabilities•2015

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