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COVID-19 in South Asia: State practices, responses and the experiences of persons with disability within the region

MEHROTRA, Nilika
SOLDATIC, Karen
2021

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An introduction into South Asia looking at the pandemic who people are struggling with in 2020. The DGS has aimed to first identify and acknowledge the diversity of disability experiences in the Global South and, second, make these experiences readily available and accessible to disabled people and their communities in the regions where the contributors themselves are from. In fact, in undertaking this special issue as editors, we would like to recognize the incredible persistence of our contributors to continue to work with us throughout the development of the papers, alongside acknowledging the many original contributors who were also unable to accept our invitation to participate because of the covid19 pandemic impacts upon every aspect of their lives.

Making themselves heard: deaf people in India during the global COVID-19 pandemic

GULYANI, Ritika
2021

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The onset of the sudden and global pandemic, COVID-19, has forced all of us to change our ways of living and interacting with the outside world. Additionally, a lot of restrictions on movement mandated by governments have also been issued in the past few months. In the context of India, a nationwide lockdown was in place from midmarch till the end of May. These lock-downs have had serious consequences for various segments of the population across the country, especially, those on the margins, who are vulnerable and/or in a minority. One such segment has been the disabled population. This paper, with the help of narratives, addresses the challenges faced by the deaf population during the COVID crisis and the ways in which they have negotiated these. There has been a big void in the dissemination of information to the deaf, owing to the fact that the majority of information from official sources has not been translated into sign language. More so, in times when information is the key to maintaining proper health care, this is a big lacuna. Additionally, the paper will also talk about the role of technology as well as of deaf groups in the lives of deaf people, and how it has proved to be very helpful to not just spread proper awareness about the pandemic, but also in trying to build up a movement in trying to recognise Indian Sign Language as the 23rd Official Language of India. 

Psychosocial Consequences of COVID-19 on Persons with Visual Impairments

NAYAR, Mahima
JUVVA, Srilatha
LAKSHMAN, Chitra
2021

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The ongoing pandemic situation has disrupted lives globally. These disruptions are embodied in gender, social location, ethnicity and in the body. Public health facilities, accessibility of urban infrastructure, support services for persons with disability, educational accessibility in cities prior to the pandemic have influenced the manner in which disabled people are able to adapt to the current situation. This paper presents the experiences of young people living with visual impairments who reside in an urban low-income community in India. It explores the unique challenges such as the further reduction in accessibility to health and educational facilities that they are facing and the manner in which their carefully structured everyday lives have changed. The narratives also describe the manner in which they are coping with the public health disaster in addition to preparing for the new ‘norms’ that people living with visual impairments are required to navigate as an outcome of the pandemic. The paper gives voice to their needs and requirements in this situation, and in turn, aims to inform policy responses through first person accounts. 

Mental health of LGBTIQ+ people in India during the COVID 19 pandemic: risks, access, lessons

TENNETI, Suchaita
2021

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The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated containment measures have resulted in a mental health crisis globally. Marginalised populations have been disproportionately affected during the pandemic with an aggravation of existing inequalities, and this has increased the risks to their mental health. The LGBTIQ+ population is among those marginalised whose lives have been rendered even more precarious than before by the pandemic. This paper explores some of the main risks to the mental health of LGBTIQ+ people in India, the advice being given to them by mental health professionals and activists, and need for queer revisionings of uncertainty, the concept of a future and individualism.

Uncertain Personhood: Notes on Ageing and Disability in Guwahati During COVID 19

BEZBARUAH, Vaijayanti
2021

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The circumstantial understanding of the ‘normal’, ushered in by the spread of COVID 19, has been the practice of ‘social distancing’. Exercising this ‘new normal’ has been a challenge in general for society. However, it is particularly important to recognize the psycho-social impact and analyse it through the lens of ageing in relation to experiences of disability. This paper therefore attempts to explore the experiences of uncertainties in the light of ageing with disabilities, pronounced during a time of crisis, leading to social distress. With the help of telephonic conversations, the paper discusses some of the stories of people living in Guwahati, in the age-group of 70 to 90, drawing on an intersectional understanding of personhood, social suffering, and symbolic disability. It is also an attempt to look into the aspect of wellbeing (physical, psychological and emotional) of the elderly amidst disabilities, while stepping into unfamiliar social boundaries of ambiguity, that further disable the elderly in terms of the sudden fading of the regular support structures and systematic foundations of the ‘social’ once known to them.

Emergent Disability voices on Social Media during COVID -19 times

MEHROTRA, Nilika
2021

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Persons with disabilities are invisible and almost silent in the Indian media. This paper examines the emergence of articulate expressions of persons with disabilities (pwd) in the social media over the months March to June 2020 during COVID Lockdown. While technology has been seen as a great leveller for persons with disabilities, the digital divide, however, remains very real for masses of disabled persons, whereby it is largely the educated middle class who have access to internet facilities and presence on social media. This paper draws from observation and analysis of posts on Facebook by different categories of persons with disabilities. There appear to be a number of discourses emerging and imageries running almost parallel. Accessibility and support appear to be very important issues especially in terms of access to domestic workers, regular medical checkups, and procuring daily provisions as well as access to online teaching. On the other hand, little concern is being paid to the huge humanitarian crisis of returnee workers from cities to villages. Interestingly, disabled persons appeared more connected, participating in discussions and Webinars and voicing out their experiences with greater clarity and also analysing the COVID situation through Disability Studies (DS) perspectives.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 2

2019

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Articles included are:

  • A comparison of disability rights in employment: Exploring the potential of the UNCRPD in Uganda and the United States
  • Reimagining personal and collective experiences of disability in Africa
  • Social participation and inclusion of ex-combatants with disabilities in Colombia
  • ‘Inclusive education’ in India largely exclusive of children with a disability
  • Participation, agency and disability in Brazil: transforming psychological practices into public policy from a human rights perspective

‘Inclusive education’ in India largely exclusive of children with a disability

GRILLS, Nathan
DEVABHAKTULA, Jacob
BUTCHER, Nicole
AROKIARAJ, Sarojitha
DAS Prottoy Kumar
ANDERSON, Pam
2019

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Exclusion of children with a disability from education negatively affects national economic growth. Education is important for children with a disability to acquire skills that allow them to gain employment, and thus address a key driver of poverty. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015 to better understand the relationship between disability, education and health among children in India. Across 17 states in India, the study sample included 39,723 households with a child aged 0-59 months (163,400 individual cases in total), based on randomised cluster sampling methodology. Key outcomes of interest were school attendance, completion of early childhood education and highest level of education. The study found one percent prevalence of disability, nearly double among boys (1.38%) compared to girls (0.77%), and linked disability to lower level access to education and highest level of education. This study confirms the negative relationship between disability and educational exposure among children, and highlights that India’s efforts to make education a fundamental right of every child have not yet translated to benefits for children with a disability. There remains a pressing need for well-designed longitudinal studies that capture the barriers and protective factors of school attendance at every transition between stages of schooling in children with a disability.

 

Disability and the Global South, 2019, Vol.6, No. 2

The Re-covering Self: a critique of the recovery-based approach in India’s mental health care

BAYETTI, Clement
JADHAV, Sushrut
JAIN, Sumeet
2016

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This paper critiques recent initiatives for deploying the Recovery Model in the Indian sub-continent. It traces the history and growth of the model, and questions its applicability for mental health care in the Indian sub-continent. The authors argue that mental health professionals in this region are at the crossroads of a familiar past: either to uncritically import and apply a Euro-American 'recovery' model or reconfigure its fundamental premise such that it is embraced by the majority Indian population. The paper proposes a fundamental re-thinking of existing culturally incongruent 'Recovery Models' before application in India’s public mental health and clinic settings. More crucially, policy makers, clinicians and researchers need to reconsider the local validity of what constitutes 'recovery' for the very people who place their trust in State mental health services. This critical reappraisal, together with essential culturally-sensitive research, is germane to prevent yet again the deployment of culture-blind programmes and practices. Addressing these uncontested issues has profound implications for public mental health in the Global South.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2016, Vol. 3 No. 1

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2016, Vol. 3 No. 1

2016

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Articles include:

  • Disability and armed conflict: A quest for Africanising disability in Uganda
  • Disadvantage and disability: Experiences of people from refugee backgrounds with disability living in Australia
  • Tangible First Steps: Inclusion Committees as a Strategy to Create Inclusive Schools in Western Kenya
  • The Re-covering Self: a critique of the recovery-based approach in India’s mental health care
  • To what extent is Universal Design for Learning “universal”? A case study in township special needs schools in South Africa
  • Una Vida Sin Palabras?: Disability, Subalternity and the Sandinista Revolution

Interrogating the impact of scientific and technological development on disabled children in India and beyond

WOLBRING, Gregor
GHAI, Anita
2015

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Products of scientific and technological developments are emerging at an ever increasing speed whereby these developments impact the daily life of humans in numerous ways. We focus for this paper on two classes of emerging products; one being social robots and the other being products that are envisioned to increase the cognitive abilities of humans beyond the species-typical and their impact on aspects of childhood such as education and self-identity formation. We analyse the utility and impact of these two classes of products through the lens of the alternative report on India to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) Committee on the Rights of Children authored by the by National Disability Network of India and the lens of ability expectations. We posit that the discourses around these two classes of emerging products do not address the problems the alternative report raises, but could heighten the problems identified by the report. We believe the two classes of products highlight the need for ability expectation governance.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 2

‘Ask us what we need’: Operationalizing Guidance on Disability Inclusion in Refugee and Displaced Persons Programs

PEARCE, Emma
2015

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Persons with disabilities remain one of the most vulnerable and socially excluded groups in any displaced community. Barriers to accessing humanitarian assistance programs increase their protection risks, including risk of violence, abuse and exploitation. Women’s Refugee Commission has been supporting the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and implementing partners to translate guidance on disability inclusion into practice at field levels through the provision of technical support to eight country operations. In the course of the project, WRC has consulted with over 600 persons with disabilities and care-givers and over 130 humanitarian actors in displacement contexts. Key protection concerns identified include a lack of participation in community decision making; stigma and discrimination of children and young persons with disabilities by their non-disabled peers; violence against persons with disabilities, including gender-based violence; lack of access to disabilityspecific health care; and unmet basic needs among families of persons with multiple impairments. Suggested strategies to further advance disability inclusion in humanitarian programming include: strengthening identification of protection risks and case management services for persons with disabilities; facilitating contextspecific action planning around key guidelines; and engaging the disability movement in advocacy on refugee issues.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 1

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Disability: A critical study of an invisibilized constituency in India

VAIDYA, Shruti
2015

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This paper explores childhood sexual abuse as understood by disabled individuals from their particular locations. The paper reports on qualitative research with disabled adults identifying themselves as survivors/victims of childhood sexual abuse. In the Indian context, Childhood sexual abuse has been understood in a monolithic way, erasing all differences that exist among children from different social locations. The paper attempts to provide an alternative perspective by focusing on the specificities of the experiences of disabled persons. The textual sources examined in the paper investigate the concept of childhood, disability and sexuality and their interconnections, both in the Western and the Indian context. Discourses that construct children as passive and ignorant make it important to provide narratives which capture strategies of resistance within power structures which constrain choices. This paper makes an attempt to document and analyze the experiences of disabled individuals who have undergone childhood sexual abuse within the larger context of Indian laws, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which engage with the concept and reportage and which represent dominant views on Childhood sexual abuse and disabilities.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 2

Representation, access and contestation: Facebook and vision impairment in Jordan, India, and Peru

PAL, Joyojeet
ALFARO, Ana Maria Huaita
AMMARI, Tawfiq W
CHHABRA, Sidharth
LAKSHMANAN, Meera
2015

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This paper presents qualitative research on the use of Facebook by visually impaired people and organizations representing them in Jordan, Peru, and India. We found that individuals and organizations have very different motivations and pathways for using social media. Social media serve as a means to help individuals with vision impairments to expand their social circles, network with casual acquaintances, and find various kinds of social and technical resources independently. However on issues of representation we found that social media have the potential to play a double-edged sword, reinforcing in some cases the same stereotypes that individual users of assistive technology (AT) sought to overcome by using technology in their professional lives. We find that individuals often characterize social media and assistive technology in the same vein — suggesting that for many parts of the global South, the dramatic change in the means and ability to leverage social and professional possibilities has not come from any one technology alone, but from a broader evolution of the technological environment available to people with vision impairments. Access to social media and technology disrupt an environment in which social and economic spaces for people with disabilities are still a zone of contestation between a dominant discourse of vision impairment enforced by generations of negative representations of disability, and a new world of technology users challenging representations and assumptions as engaged, connected professionals.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2, No. 2 Special issue: Disabled children and disabling childhoods in the global South

2015

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Articles include:

  • EDITORIAL Frames and debates for disability, childhood and the global South: Introducing the Special Issue
  • Using Postcolonial Perspectives to Consider Rehabilitation with Children with Disabilities: The Bamenda-Toronto Dialogue
  • Vietnam’s children’s experiences of being visually or hearing impaired
  • Disabling streets or disabling education? Challenging a deficit model of street-connectedness
  • Revolutionary entanglements: Transversal mappings of disability in the favela
  • For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North
  • Childhood Sexual Abuse and Disability: A critical study of an invisibilized constituency in India
  • Interrogating the impact of scientific and technological development on disabled children in India and beyond

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

2015

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Articles include:

  • Typhoon Haiyan One Year On: Disability, Poverty and Participation in the Philippines
  • Beneath the rhetoric: Policy to reduce the mental health treatment gap in Africa
  • Working within the tensions of disability and education in post-colonial Kenya: Toward a praxis of critical disability studies
  • How disability studies and ecofeminist approaches shape research: exploring small-scale farmer perceptions of banana cultivation in the Lake Victoria region, Uganda
  • Partnerships for Disability Research in Africa: Lessons Learned in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Representation, Access and Contestation: Facebook and Vision Impairment in Jordan, India, and Peru

Performing the Stare in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

CHATTOPADHYAY, Sagarika
NAYAK, Amarjeet
2014

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This article intends to explore the materiality of disability through the notions of staring and bodies, as existing in the case of disability. The dynamic interactions that flow back and forth between the starer and the staree are inverted as the scales of who is staring and who is stared at are occasionally found to be at crossroads with the colonial or masculine gaze. This problematises the stare and its valorization within the field of disability as well as its valence with other kinds of gazes. This article shows how the ‘disabled’ person does not depend upon the able in conferring meaning upon itself in a society saturated with assumptions of ableism and that claims to own the power over the other in exercising the stare, demanding a story, and using language to assert itself. It raises questions around what disability is about and its notional creation in an able society. A slip often occurs from notional disablism to a notional ableism, with both categories being the subjects of a cultural construction. And this slip indicates the liminal space that disabled subjects often occupy while performing acts in their everyday life. The setting for this article is the powerful novel of Animal’s People and its intrepid hero Animal whose life is explored in a search of some answers to the questions raised here.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1

Globalizing psychiatry and the case of ‘vanishing’ alternatives in a neo- colonial state

DAVAR, Bhargavi
2014

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Analysing ‘modernity’ in India is a complex exercise, as the movement of the ‘modern’ is locally determined and may be non-linear at different sites and contexts. General medicine and psychiatry are illustrative of the difference in how ‘patienthood’ has been historically constructed, with each wave of ‘modernisation’ changing the subjecthood of the ‘mentally ill’. Unlike the public health sector in India, the mental health sector is driven by the ‘mental asylum’ archetype, continuing through late colonial times into contemporary science in refurbished designs. A related set of changes also concomitantly happened in the domain of indigenous healing, with each epistemic shift pushing this domain to the margins of knowledge and healing practice. The paper is set against the time period covering 1850s until recently (2014).

 

Disability and the Global South, 2014, Vol. 1 No. 2

Faith Healing in India: The Cultural Quotient of the Critical

SIDDIQUI, Sabah
LACROIX, Kimberly
DHAR, Anup
2014

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We have had two ‘cultures of critique'. One is where critique of a culture's own principles is generated internally. The other is when critique is mounted from the outside. This paper is an attempt to shore up the two-fold nature of both culture of critique and critique of culture through a close examination of an extant and entrenched cultural practice provisionally called ‘faith healing' in its interlocution with western mental health models that are incumbent upon the Indian setting. This paper will explore what critical theory may need to consider in the context of India. Would it need a cultural turn, a culturalising? What is meant by culturalising? Would ‘culturalising', in turn, be premised on a bidirectional or dual critique, that is, a critique of both the West's hegemonic principles as well as principles that hegemonize the East, emanating from either the West or from the East? What relation would critique set up with an existing culture and cultural practice? What relation would culture set up with an existing culture of critique? In the process, this paper is also an attempt to inaugurate and locate the beginning coordinates of a critique of critique through the turn to culture in conditions called ‘faith healing'. The paper is also about the tense and troubled dialogue between the current globalization of certain frameworks in mental health, and local (faith-based) practices of health and healing that have survived in India; survived even in mutation and transformation, through colonialism, civilizing mission, welfarism and developmentalism. How would the knowledge and practice of mental health take shape in India – a landscape crisscrossed by on the one hand, aggressively modern institutions of mental health science and on the other, extant and surviving institutions of faith-based healing practices? While we remain critically mired in faith-based practices, while we cannot but be critical of some faith-based practices, we also cannot announce the silent demise of all Other imaginations of health and healing and let One global discourse take hold of all cultures. Hence, perhaps the need for what we have called the difficult ‘dual critique’. For critique also means an account of and an attention to experience and practice; an account formulated on its own terms and not on terms put in place by globalizing discourses. 

 

Disability and the Global South, 2014, Vol. 1 No. 2

Disability and the Global South, 2014, Vol. 1, No. 2 - Special issue: Globalising Mental Health or Pathologising the Global South? Mapping the Ethics, Theory and Practice of Global Mental Health

2014

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Articles include:

  • EDITORIAL Globalising Mental Health or Pathologising the Global South? Mapping the Ethics, Theory and Practice of Global Mental Health
  • How ‘evidence-based’ is the Movement for Global Mental Health?
  • Reciprocity in Global Mental Health Policy
  • Culture, Politics and Global Mental Health
  • Globalizing psychiatry and the case of ‘vanishing’ alternatives in a neo- colonial state
  • Faith Healing in India: The Cultural Quotient of the Critical
  • Mental Health Care, Diagnosis, and the Medicalization of Social Problems in Ukraine
  • Passive-Aggressive: Māori Resistance and the Continuance of Colonial Psychiatry in Aotearoa New Zealand
  • Neurasthenia Revisited: Psychologising precarious labor and migrant status in contemporary discourses of Asian American nervousness
  • Tools for the journey from North to South: A collaborative process to develop reflexive global mental health practice

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